


Xanadu

by campitor



Series: synchronous orbits [2]
Category: The Expanse (TV), The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, Dirty Talk, Everyone has feelings and no one is talking about them, First Time, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Multi, Polyamory Negotiations, Relationship Negotiation, Rough Sex, Threesome - F/M/M, it'll get happier i promise!!!, roci gang on vacation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:47:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 35,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26292127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/campitor/pseuds/campitor
Summary: Following their camping trip, Amos, Holden, and Naomi navigate the new waters of their intertwining relationships.
Relationships: Amos Burton/Jim Holden, Amos Burton/Naomi Nagata, Jim Holden/Naomi Nagata, eventual Jim Holden/Naomi Nagata/Amos Burton
Series: synchronous orbits [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1910413
Comments: 135
Kudos: 136





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back! This fic immediately follows Starlight/Firelight, so I do suggest reading that one first if you haven't already. I hope that you enjoy!

Titan managed to straddle the line separating gaudy and beautiful without committing to either. The domes that enclosed the luxury resorts were made of reinforced glass and etched with patterns, some swirling and organic, others geometric and rigid. The lightning that the moon was famous for danced above, splitting the dark clouds and refracting across the patterns in the glass, scattering rainbows onto tile floors. A constant methane drizzle pattered on the domes.

The resorts themselves were filled with greenery—flowers bright as nebulas, jungle vines that crept up trees and trellises, and leaves so big you could use them as dinner plates. The carefully curated ecosystem was pollinated by a mixture of real hummingbirds, bright and twitchy as children’s toys, and nanotech bugs that carefully selected which plants to cross, which to let die. The flora was landscaped to look wild, to look as if it would swallow the resorts whole if left unchecked. But all around the dome, horticulturists bullied the plants back and carefully maintained the illusion of disorder. 

That was all Titan was to Holden—an illusion. Outside of the domes, methane lakes were waiting to drown unwary rovers, and the sun only managed to squeak a few rays through the moon’s thick atmosphere. Far away from the gaze of tourists drinking imported alcohol and eating at luxury restaurants, Belters worked the fertilizer factories and methane wells that buoyed the moon’s economy. 

Hydrocarbons and hooch. Those were the two things that cemented Titan as one of the most prosperous moons in the system. Holden smiled grimly to himself at the thought. 

“What’s so funny?” Naomi asked him. They were seated side-by-side in a booth, their knees touching underneath the table. The bar they had chosen was mostly empty aside from a table of what looked like off duty waitstaff. She poked a finger into the meat of his arm as if to emphasize her question. Her nails, normally kept blunt and utilitarian, were longer than normal—a testament to the easy, drama-free flight from Luna to Titan. It was a welcome reprieve after all they had been through; the Roci was finally back in good shape after their misadventures in the Slow Zone. 

“Nothing,” Holden replied, turning to look at her. “Just this place, I guess.” He caught the offending finger between his thumb and pointer finger, trapping it for a moment before lacing their fingers together. “It’s just sort of ridiculous. The atmosphere wants to kill us outside and here we are drinking cocktails and smelling hibiscus.” 

Naomi rolled her eyes. “Promise me you’re going to try and have fun here,” she chided him good-naturedly, squeezing his hand. “We’re on vacation.”

“I will. I promise to start having fun as soon as Amos’ brings our drinks over.” 

“Sitting here talking to me isn’t fun for you?” Naomi pulled her hand away in mock indignation, clutching it to her chest as if he had burned her. There was a smile threatening the corners of her exaggerated frown. 

“I’m just saying, it would be more fun if we were drinking.” 

Naomi scoffed, then broke into a fit of laughter. She pushed at him playfully, then wrapped one long arm around his shoulders. Her brown eyes were warm, bright, and full of affection. She looked happier than he had seen her in a while, and he found himself grinning back, her good mood contagious. He was about to lean in and kiss her when Amos trundled up to the table with three glasses balanced in his hands. “Margaritas,” he announced, setting one down in front of each of them. “Double strong and made with real tequila. None of that rice wine shit.”

Naomi raised a brow and untangled her arm from Holden. “I’m impressed, Amos. I didn’t take you as a tequila connoisseur.” 

Amos sucked down a third of his drink and gave her a saucy wink over the rim of the glass. “You know me, boss. I’m a Renaissance man. Tequila consumption is just one of my many talents. Right, Cap?” Now he leered at Holden, who deflected with a withering gaze of his own. 

Naomi laughed at that, swatted at Amos’ arm, and then proceeded to passionately defend the virtues of rice wine margaritas as Amos shook his head. Holden watched the pair closely. 

The trip to Titan had partially been arranged because the crew of the Rocinante currently had no other obligations—his calls to Avasarala went unanswered, and Fred Johnson just shrugged in apology every time he asked about work. They had money to burn and nowhere to be, and so a vacation had seemed like a good idea. “If you’re looking for a place to fucking autoclave your brain for a few months, Titan’s the place to do it,” Amos had said back on their camping trip.

But the other reason had thus far gone unspoken. Holden knew that he, Amos, and Naomi had to figure out their new dynamic now that he and Amos were sleeping together. It was just sex, and he was pretty sure Amos was happy to keep it that way. Just two good friends who also fuck occasionally, he thought. Nothing more. He took a nervous sip of his drink and coughed when he swallowed too fast.

“Alright there, Cap?” Amos asked.

“Dandy,” Holden choked back. Amos turned back to Naomi, who was now going through a list of cocktails to make with rice wine.

Holden still wasn’t sure what to call this thing with him and Amos. It was easy with Naomi—she was his partner, the sun which he spun around. Naomi was everything. But Amos…Holden still wasn’t sure what it was exactly. Amos was one of the people he was most afraid of and most fascinated by all at once. He was steady as rock and yet as unpredictable as a tidal wave. They had sex at least once a week now—good sex, clawing sex, biting sex. He’d leave Amos’ cabin feeling contentedly bruised, blood singing with adrenaline, and then he would fall into bed with Naomi and delight in all of the ways he could make her moan and gasp. He bounced between them, caught in their matching but separate orbits. 

He kept searching for a sign that something had changed, for a sign that either Naomi or Amos were unhappy with the arrangement. Always looking for trouble, his parents had often said. Objectively, he knew he was projecting his own insecurity on them. Naomi seemed pleased enough about the whole thing. Amos had reassured him that he could pull the plug at any time and there would be no hard feelings. He trusted them, knew that he had to trust them to be honest with their feelings. But the thought of hurting either of them was eating him alive. Worse still, he was consumed with the guilt of knowing that, at the end of the day, he would always choose Naomi. He wondered what that said about him. Holden kept telling himself that Amos wouldn’t at all be offended by it; hell, the mechanic would probably be upset if it wasn’t the case. But the little voice crept creeping in, the one that constantly projected his own feelings onto Amos: what if it did upset him? What if Amos wanted more? 

What if _he_ wanted more?

“Cap!” Amos’ tone indicated that this was not the first time he had tried to get Holden’s attention. 

“Sorry,” Holden said and took another nervous sip of his cocktail. “What’s up?”

“Well, I wanted to know if you had ever had mezcal back on Earth. Now I want to know what the hell is eating at you.”

“Nothing,” Holden lied. “Let’s just relax, right?”

Amos snorted. “I’m relaxing. Naomi’s relaxing. You’re the only one not relaxing here, Cap.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled again. 

“You’re driving me fucking insane. Stop apologizing.” Amos downed the rest of his drink and placed another order on the pad in front of them.

Naomi put a hand on Holden’s arm. “Jim. Is everything okay?” She gave Amos a pointed look, and the big man stood and headed over to the bar. Holden could see the tension in his shoulders, and it made guilt gnaw at his belly with sharp teeth. “What’s eating at you?”

Holden exhaled gustily. “Just…this. I don’t know. I feel weird.”

She looked genuinely confused. “About being on vacation?”

“No. About us. You, me, and Amos. It’s making me feel weird.”

Her eyes widened just a fraction, flicked over to Amos’ retreating back. “Okay,” Naomi said slowly, carefully. She had adopted the tone of capital-T Talks, the sort of long discussions, sometimes arguments, that were inevitable in any type of relationship. “Talk to me about that.”

He breathed in deep, let the air out slowly. He glanced over to Amos; he was hunched at the bar, sipping at his drink alone. The bartender wandered over to Amos and Holden could hear him asking about his tattoos. Flirting, he realized. “I’m just not used to this yet. It feels…I don’t know, it feels too easy.” He paused. There was a lump growing in his throat. “I’m afraid that I’ll lose both of you if I fuck this up somehow.” 

Naomi hummed. She withdrew her hand from his arm; a subconscious gesture, but one that made Holden’s skin crawl. It felt like a warning. “I’m going to ask you something. You don’t have to answer right now, but I want you to think about it.”

The lump grew larger. “Okay.”

“Would it be easier if all three of us were in a relationship?”

Holden swallowed. He thought about what that would be like, but he found it hard to turn Amos and Naomi’s close, deep friendship into something romantic. But, the lizard part of his brain thought about what it would be like to watch Amos and Naomi have sex, and fuck, if that wasn’t a tempting thought. The tequila was making his brain loose, his thoughts liquid. The image would have embarrassed him before, but now it was just arousing. Naomi was watching the wheels turn in his head, a faint, reassuring smile dancing on her lips.

But what would being in a relationship with Naomi and Amos even be like? Surely that would change the dynamic more than the current arrangement did. Amos had said time and time again that he didn’t do relationships. How would he even react if Holden told him that he wanted to transition from friends with benefits to something else? More importantly—and god, even thinking that made Holden’s stomach clench with guilt—how would it change the deep bond that he shared with Naomi? 

“I don’t know,” Holden admitted. “I need to think about that.” 

“That’s fine,” Naomi reassured. “Jim, I think you’re the only one who’s stressed about this. I’m happy. Amos seems happy. It’s okay to have more than one lover.” She paused. “I thought you’d know that, given your parents.”

“I thought I would too,” Holden admitted. “I guess it’s just more complicated in practice.” 

“You look for problems, and you try to fix them,” Naomi said very gently. “It’s one of the things I like about you. But it gets you into trouble, too.”

He glanced back over at the bar. Amos was alone now, the bartender off serving other customers. There was an empty glass before him, another drink in his hand. Holden watched him sip, swallow, study the labels on the liquor shelves. 

Naomi continued, “If you keep trying to poke holes in it, then you are going to poke holes in it, sasa?”

He nodded. She was right, as she usually was. He met her gaze and gave her a reassuring smile, taking her hand in his own in squeezing. She smiled back. 

“Jim,” she said. Her voice had gone very soft. “If you have feelings for Amos, that’s okay. I know you. I know how your heart works. But we all need to talk about it if you do—you, me, and Amos.” She paused and seemed to consider her next words carefully. He felt his chest grow tight. “And you need to be prepared for Amos to be uncomfortable with that.”

He squeezed her hand again. There was a lot of meaning in her words, but he couldn’t bear to parse them now. “I know. Thank you. I love you.” 

He felt some of the anxiety and guilt melt away when Naomi pressed a kiss to his cheek and leaned against his shoulder. When he glanced back at the bar, Amos was gone. 

\---

Amos wasn’t good at reading social cues, but he usually knew when he wasn’t wanted. Naomi’s cues had been clear enough. Scram.

He got it. Really, he did. Holden was freaking out about the fact that they were sleeping together now. He probably thought that both Amos and Naomi hated his guts, wanted him dead, were just pretending to put up with the arrangement for his own sake. Amos didn’t get people, but he thought he got Holden. Cap looked for problems. Amos kicked said problems in the balls. 

Nevertheless, he wasn’t going to sit at the bar while Naomi and Holden talked about…whatever back at their table. That made even him feel weird. There were plenty of good lounges and clubs on Titan where he could drink in peace while they did their relationship stuff. Brothels, too. They had picked one of the higher-end resorts, one of the places that catered to celebrities. Celebrities like Holden, he thought with a smirk. The brothels would all be clean, licensed, and unionized. He passed one, walked by it. Later, maybe.

Down the hall, he could hear the heavy thump of club music. He followed the glow of neon and ended up in a place called the Miami Lounge. It was decorated with pink flamingo memorabilia, filled with plants and seemed to have a hookah lounge in the back judging by the smell. He found a spot at the bar—a good corner where he could keep his watch. Some of the patrons gave him odd looks, and he thought that a few might recognize him. That irked him. Holden was supposed to be the celebrity. He was just a mechanic. 

He ordered a beer, took a long pull that made the bubbles tickle his nose. He thought about Naomi and Holden, wondered what they were talking about. Hell, maybe they were already back in their room fucking like the little rabbits they were. He thought about that for a moment—not fantasizing, but curious. He tried to imagine what they did after they had sex. Holden was handsy and touchy, so they probably cuddled, maybe fell asleep naked, limbs tangled. He tried to imagine what it would be like to fall asleep with his arms wrapped around Holden. It didn’t seem like it would be very comfortable, but the mammalian part of his brain perked up at the thought. There was a lump forming in his throat. He didn’t know why. 

He thought back to sitting on the porch in Montana, the way Holden had pulled him in for a kiss, lingering and soft. It had set off a red flag for Amos, a bright warning light that told him he had to be careful about maintaining boundaries with Holden. He couldn’t give the captain what he was looking for—what he already had with Naomi. If he and Holden got involved beyond sex, it would only end with Holden’s feelings getting hurt. Amos was certain of this.

Another image of Holden and Naomi flickered into focus. She loved to comb her fingers through his hair, tease at his beard when he grew it out. The image shifted, and suddenly it was Amos running his fingers through Holden’s dark hair as the captain groused over logs and shipping manifestos and the general minutia of owning a ship. His hair got so warm in the summer sun as they sat by the lake. He could still feel it on his fingers.

The lump was growing, becoming more insistent. He ordered another beer. His thoughts were coalescing into something, but he wasn’t sure what yet. Then it hit him, hard and painful like a punch. The lump was pulsing now. He felt his saliva production ramp up, his knuckles tense on his glass. 

As a rule, Amos didn’t allow himself to want things. He didn’t want a nice hole on Ceres, or lots of money, or a nice spouse and a couple of kids. He didn’t set goals. He didn’t have aspirations. He cared about a few things—good sex, good booze, and good tools for the Roci. But wanting things got people in trouble. Wanting things led to strong emotions and hurt feelings and messes in general. The men who had abused him had wanted power, had wanted good reasons to hate themselves. Alex had wanted a family, and look where that had gotten him. 

It was easier not to want anything. It was better. It allowed him to be the person that Holden, Naomi, and Alex needed him to be. 

That’s why the realization that he wanted Holden was so painful. It ripped through him like a bullet and left just as much damage in its wake. He wanted Holden, and that broke every rule he had ever created for himself. 

“Fuck,” he said aloud. Quietly, but the young man beside him heard it. His dark skin was patterned with tattoos that looked like circuit schematics and his long hair was pulled up in a tight bun. 

“What’s up, big guy?” the man asked, leaning toward Amos. 

“Ah, nothing.” Amos swiped a bead of condensation up the side of the glass. “Just a stupid thought.” 

The man laughed and lifted his glass in salute. “I feel you there. My boyfriend just dumped me. I’ve been thinking stupid thoughts all night.”

“Damn. Sorry.”

The man shrugged. “Who gives a fuck. I’m on vacation, he’s off being miserable on some rockhopper. Good fucking riddance.”

“So, what, you’re here for a rebound?” Amos realized too late that that was probably the wrong thing to say, but the man laughed and nodded.

“Yeah, you could call it that. I’m Yasin, by the way.”

“Timmy.” 

Yasin grinned at him, his eyes lidded. “Are you here for a rebound, Timmy?” 

Amos looked at the man, visually traced the curve of his long neck, the lines of his fingers as he toyed with his drink. He could cut out this thing with Holden, cauterize it, make a clean break. He could destroy it before it grew and got cancerous. He was good at that. He was good at cutting out the want, wadding it up and throwing it away. He smiled his flat smile at Yasin.

“I guess you could call it that.”

Later, Yasin was pressing him against the door of his hotel room, kissing his lips, his neck. His hands made quick work of Amos’ shirt, started to work on the zipper of his pants. Amos thought once again about Holden and Naomi cuddling in their post-coital bliss. Thought about that day by the lake, his head in Holden’s lap. Then Yasin dropped to his knees and put his mouth on Amos’ cock, and Amos didn’t think about anything anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me at pig-wings.tumblr.com for general OT3 appreciation and gnarly bird facts.


	2. Chapter 2

Naomi lay with her head on Holden’s shoulder, idly stroking his chest. She swam through the sleepy haziness that came after good sex, letting her senses dull and brighten in turn, allowing her body to move and relax of its own accord. Holden let out a contented sigh; his eyes were shut, and his head was propped up by his arm.

“Okay, now I’m relaxed.”

She smiled and pressed a kiss to the nearest bit of skin she could reach. Holden made a soft sound in the back of his throat and let one hand trail down to rest on her shoulder blade. They lay together like that, dozing, until Jim broke the silence. His question seemed to catch in his throat, hesitant.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Always, Jim,” she replied sleepily.

“You have to promise that you’re not going to throw me out of bed.”

She chuckled and then tilted her head up to look at him. “Okay, now I’m really curious. Shoot.”

“How come you and Amos never got together?”

Naomi inhaled, let the breath out slowly. Honestly, she had been surprised when he hadn’t asked about this earlier, after Amos had left. It was something she found herself thinking about often as of late, trying to pick through her complicated feelings for Amos, the way their relationship had changed over the years. If he had asked her that a year ago, she would have laughed. But she realized now that it was a relevant question, and one she could no longer answer with certainty.

“You don’t have to answer that,” Jim mumbled, mistaking her thoughtful silence for irritation. “I’m sorry.”

“No, no, I’m just…thinking.” He hummed in response, moved the hand on her back up to her arm and began to stroke gently.

“Well,” she began, “When Amos and I first met on the _Cant_ , I wasn’t in a very good place.” She paused. It was tempting to elaborate, to spill everything that had happened with Marco and Filip, but something in her heart still wouldn’t let her. Whenever she reached for the door—whenever she tried to open all that hurt to share with Holden—whatever was guarding that part of her would snarl and gnash its teeth like a wounded animal and she knew to leave it alone. She breathed in deeply. “When I hired him on, I was just looking for someone to do the work and leave me alone. Which, he did. But then I realized that I didn’t have to be okay around him. That he wouldn’t judge me for not being okay.”

“Yeah,” Holden agreed, “He’s good at that.”

“So we got pretty close. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t have expectations, except that I would be a fair boss. I started to realize he needed…” She paused here, fishing for the right word. “…guidance, and he seemed more than happy to let me provide that. We would go clubbing on shore leave, I’d keep an eye on him, and he’d keep an eye out for me, too.” It was one of the more selfish reasons she would drag Amos out to the clubs with her and her friends on the ship—when people saw them enter alongside the big man, even the boldest creeps tended to keep their distance.

“Honestly,” she continued, “I’m a little surprised that we never hooked up. I think he would have when we first met, but he knew I wasn’t interested, so that was the end of it. He never brought it up. By the time the thought started to cross my mind, I knew it would probably just make him uncomfortable. Plus, it just seemed like a bad idea. He never slept with anyone on the _Cant_. He only ever went to the brothels.”

“So you _have_ thought about it.”

She laughed at his smugly satisfied tone. “I mean, sure. He’s pretty hot. I mean, when you get that close to someone, the thought crosses your mind at _least_ once.”

She could feel Jim’s smile in the way his muscles tensed. It filled her with warmth. She thought back to some of her and Amos’ times together on the _Cant_. She remembered a time when he had actually gotten so drunk that he had let her teach him Martian samba. She wondered if he still remembered the steps; she’d have to ask. That was probably the closest they had ever gotten to falling into bed together. She distinctly remembered the feeling of their bodies pressed together, the dopey, genuine smile that she so rarely saw on him. Amos had been so warm, like a living furnace, and his hand had held her waist in his strong grip. That memory was still very special to her. It was one of the only times she had seen him truly let his guard down.

“Can I tell you something?”

“Of course.”

“You know how I found him and Alex after the second slow-down? When you were on the station? When I got to Amos, I thought he was dead. I really did. And when I thought that…” The feeling was coming back now, and the fear she had felt in that moment was leaking back out of the recesses of her mind. She had seen Amos fucked up pretty bad before—hell, she had watched him get shot in the knee—but she had never seen him so limp and vulnerable. “When I thought he was dead, it was like part of me had died too. I don’t know what I would have done if he had died. I…I don’t think I could handle that, Jim.” 

Jim pulled her tighter against his body. She took a shuddering breath, trying to will the memory away. “I was so afraid I was going to lose you all. You, Amos, Camina, Alex. It scared the hell out of me. I had gone from being alone for so long to never being alone, no matter where I was, that—” She cut herself off as her throat grew tight. Jim was rubbing her arm now, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “And the thought of Amos being dead felt the worst. Because I don’t think I ever really told him what he means to me.” She thought that she might love Amos in a way that wasn’t strictly platonic. It was a new thought, startling and warming at the same time. At the same time, it felt like something her heart had always known.

“We should talk to him, Naomi. We should talk to Amos.”

Maybe Jim was right. Maybe it was time to transition her relationship with Amos relationship into something new. They were already so intimate, already knew everything about each other. They could practically read each other’s thoughts. The thought of being in a truly polyamorous relationship with both Jim and Amos was very appealing to her—she realized that she had never crystalized that thought before now. She wondered if the thought had even been there prior to finding Amos after the slow-down. Something to unpack later when her body wasn’t thrumming with endorphins.

“Maybe we should,” she agreed hesitantly. “I—I would like that. But, Jim, really—I’m not sure he’s going to want that. It might freak him out. I just think we need to talk through the best way to approach it. No need to rush, yeah?”

She felt Jim shrug against the pillow. “I know. I don’t want to make him uncomfortable either. But he’s changed a lot, Naomi. More than I think he’s even realized. A year ago, I would agree with you. But now…” He gestured vaguely with his hand.

“You just can’t feel bad if he turns us down.”

Jim chuckled. “Well, I’ll probably feel a little bad. But I’m not going to hold it against him.”

She smiled into his skin. Her mind whirled with these new thoughts. It was strange to think that she might be in love with Amos. It felt like such a different love than the one she had with Jim. But, then again, she loved Camina in her own way too. Maybe everyone loved everyone differently. Maybe that’s what made love so good, so freeing. She chewed on that thought for a while, imagining how she would love Amos, if he let her. Finally, the darkness herded her racing thoughts down into the deep valley, into sleep. 

\---

“So, where the hell did you go last night?” Holden asked over breakfast. Amos cocked his head like a dog as he shook hot sauce onto his egg and cheese sandwich. Naomi sighed. She had tried to talk Jim down from confronting Amos about wandering off last night, but apparently Jim was committed. She had thought their conversation last night—their realization that maybe they both wanted a relationship with Amos—would encourage him to take a gentler approach. 

“Just out for a few more drinks.”

Holden was frowning. “We were worried after you left—”

“Jim was worried after you left,” Naomi interrupted. She shot him a _what the hell are you doing?_ look. She knew Amos. She knew that this was exactly the sort of thing that drove him away.

“—so couldn’t you have given us, I dunno, a ping to let us know where you were?”

Amos stared at Jim. He looked genuinely confused, surprised. It was a face Naomi knew too well—his _is this some social rule I should know about?_ face. He glanced at her as he often did in these situations. Something tightened in her chest, caught between guilt and the odd affection she got when Amos looked to her for guidance. “Why the hell would I do that? It’s a small resort.”

Holden’s frown grew deeper. “It would just be nice,” he argued plaintively.

The corner of Amos’ lips twitched, the ghost of a smile peeking through. Naomi watched him closely. No, it wasn’t quite a smile—a sneer, maybe? Amos eyes had gone hard, face slack.

She knew this look. She could see Amos shutting down. They were tiptoeing toward dangerous waters.

She tried to meet Amos’ gaze, talk him down from this ledge he was walking up toward. Her heart fluttered nervously. But the big man was staring resolutely at Jim, something wicked playing across his face. “Yeah, okay. Sure, then. I’ll make sure I tell you whenever I’m shacking up with someone else.”

Holden’s brow furrowed. Naomi saw a flash of hurt in his eyes. She couldn’t blame him—it was an odd flex from Amos. It occurred to Naomi that the big man might be purposefully trying to hurt Jim’s feelings, which was odd. She studied Amos closely. It was often hard to tell what he was thinking, and now was no exception. Regardless, she was keenly aware that he wasn’t quite acting himself. He wasn’t shutting down like she had thought—this was something else.

“Is that where you were last night?” Holden ventured.

“Yeah. That a problem?”

“No,” Holden replied a little too quickly.

Amos took a bite of his sandwich. Holden’s gaze fell to his cup of coffee. Naomi felt her heart sink. Amos’ face was odd, torn between victory and some unreadable expression. He was staring at Jim, and his eyes were very cold. He flicked his gaze over toward Naomi, and something in his face immediately softened. She stared back at him, trying in vain to read whatever was going on in his mind.

“So what are we doing today?” Naomi asked breezily, trying to lessen some of the tension. “There’s a spa that I was going to check out. Any interest?” It was a half-truth—she knew that Jim would refuse, and that Amos would likely accept her offer. She met both of their gazes and tried to signal her intentions to each of them.

“You should go do that,” Holden said cheerily. It sounded genuine, but something in his tone still made Naomi’s heart hurt.

“Massages?” Amos inquired.

“You in then, big guy?” Naomi asked Amos. The mechanic grinned a little wolfishly and nodded.

After breakfast, Holden went back to the room to read, leaving Naomi and Amos alone just as she had intended. Jim grasped her shoulder on the way out, squeezing gently. Amos turned to face her, expression mischievous.

“Couples massage?” Amos asked, waggling an eyebrow. “It’ll be cheaper.”

“Later. What’s going on, Amos?”

Her tone meant business. Amos froze up a bit, then relaxed back into his amiable grin. “I don’t track, boss.”

“There’s something weird going on with you and Holden. You guys were all weird with each other this morning.”

“Were we?” Amos replied, as if he had no clue. Naomi grabbed his shoulder, a little harder than she meant to.

“Amos. We’re well beyond the point of you playing dumb with me.”

She saw something flicker across Amos’ face, though she couldn’t name the emotion. It held a depth that she had not seen in the man in all of the years they had known each other. He stared at Naomi, snaring her gaze in his own icy eyes, then said, “I don’t want Cap catching feelings for me.”

Naomi had known Amos for years. She knew him well enough to know when he was lying, though he was a very good liar. She knew he was lying now. She could see it in the way he held himself, in the slight tonal shifts of his voice. Why would he lie about something like that? “Do you think he is?” 

“Kinda got that impression. I ‘unno.”

“Why would that be a bad thing?” she challenged. “I would say he already has pretty strong feelings for you.”

“Because I can’t give him the type of relationship he wants,” Amos snapped. Naomi was a little taken aback by the emotion in his voice. Amos’ anger was always even and cool, wrapped in his amiable grin and level tone. This was different. _Defensive_ , a voice in the back of her mind suggested. “And if he makes me try, then this is all going to end badly.”

She breathed in, breathed out. The words made her heart constrict in something close to sympathy. What was going on with him? “Is this about you, Amos, or Jim? _Pashang_ , is this about me?”

Amos glanced at her. She saw his nostrils flare, almost imperceptible. “It ain’t about nobody. It’s about the reality of the situation.”

“Your reality,” Naomi corrected. Again, she saw shadows moving across his face. She thought that he might be growing angry at her. Good. Maybe then he would tell her what was really going on.

He was silent for a moment. She had seen videos of matadors and bulls, and Amos looked distinctly like a bull flashed a red flag. She saw the joint of his jaw pop as he worked it. Then, very quietly, he said, “I think we both know what the truth is, boss. You know me. You know me better than anyone.”

“You’re right. And to be honest? I think this is about you.”

Something seemed to overcome Amos at that moment. She felt as she could see the emotions surging, the anger rising to a boil. His fingers flexed at his side. His gaze flitted around her body, examining her stance, her weak spots. A great darkness seemed to swell beneath his surface and then, just as quickly as it had appeared, it seemed to melt away and the amiable smile was back on his face again. Amos flashed his white teeth at her, shrugged in the Belter style, and then said, “I guess you know best, boss.”

Then he strode past her. His smile was still plastered to his face. She thought that she heard him whistling as he strode away.

\---

As he walked, he smothered the embers of the fire Naomi was trying to stoke. He was good at this, at burying things deep within his body, letting them rot untouched.

Before humans had discovered how to harness fusion energy, they had buried the nuclear waste from fission reactors deep underground in elaborate, labyrinthian facilities out in the desert. That way, no one could ever accidentally stumble across the spent uranium and plutonium and die from what Amos assumed was a fuck-ton of radiation. Apparently, there had been some folks who had been really concerned about future humans digging up these waste repositories by accident. These people had devised a system of warning labels, strange architecture, and grotesque symbolism to drive away the curious in the event of societal collapse (or, that was what Amos figured, at least).

Sometimes, when he was feeling creative, Amos imagined that the darker recesses of his mind, the parts that smelled and sounded and felt like Baltimore and the emotions he could not allow himself to feel, were like these waste repositories. He buried the toxic memories and feelings deep, hoped that he didn’t disturb them on accident, and got on with his life. Easy as pie.

“‘What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us,’” he recited aloud. It made him laugh, and then he resumed his cheery whistling.

He made his way to Holden and Naomi’s room. When he got to the door he knocked once and then let himself in. “Naomi?” Holden called from somewhere in the apartment.

“Nope,” Amos replied. He toed his boots off and headed into the kitchen area. The bathroom door was ajar—Holden was standing at the sink shaving. He made eye contact with him through the mirror before resuming his task; Amos leaned against the kitchen island and watched.

“Changed your mind about spa day?” Holden asked as he rinsed the razor.

“Dunno. Maybe I’ll join her later. I was hoping that you might want to fuck.”

Holden wiped his face clean and turned to stare at him. “Now?”

“Yeah.”

“Is this about what happened at breakfast? You can fuck whoever you want. I don’t care. I just like knowing where you are.”

“Paternal,” Amos teased. He strode over to Holden, grabbed his chin in one hand and pressed his hip to the sink with the other. He felt Holden’s breath hitch. “No, I just want to fuck you.”

Holden shivered, glanced at the door. “Yeah,” he said. “Alright.”

“What’s the word?” Amos asked, running his thumb possessively along Holden’s jaw.

“The word? Oh. Rubber.”

Amos laughed lowly. They had been in the machine shop when they had come up with a safe word, and a length of rubber tubing had been the first thing Holden’s eyes had landed upon. It had just stuck.

“Why, you planning something new?” Holden asked. He grabbed the sleeve of Amos’ shirt, pulling the man’s face down level to his own.

“Nope. I just kind of feel like bending you over and railing you, Cap.” He was very tempted to kiss him, but he knew that kissing Holden would only feed his growing want; he had to let it starve. He pressed his hand on Holden’s throat, rejecting his proffered lips, and forced his chin up so that he could bite and suck at the soft skin of his neck. Holden swore and tried to pull Amos’ head up so that they could kiss, but Amos just nipped his jaw and then spun him around so that he could bend Holden over the sink.

Holden moaned and rubbed himself against Amos’ growing erection. The mechanic fumbled with Holden’s pants, pulling them down around his ankles. “You got somewhere you’ve gotta be?” Holden joked, the words coming out as a moan as Amos rubbed a finger against his rim.

“Yeah. I’ve got a mud facial and some cucumber water calling my name. Shut up and suck.” He pressed two fingers against Holden’s mouth, catching his eyes in the mirror. Holden watched him for a moment, then took Amos’ fingers into his mouth, letting his eyes flutter shut as he sucked on them.

“I’m going to fuck you just like this,” Amos murmured. “You want that?” Holden moaned an affirmative around his fingers. Amos took them from his mouth and pressed one into his hole without warning.

“Fuck—”

Amos wasted no time working him open. He watched Holden’s face grow slack and heated in the mirror, but the want relished that, savored the pink blush spreading on Holden’s cheeks. The want tried to tell him that Holden was a very beautiful man, a good man—he kicked it away like a stray dog. Amos screwed his eyes shut and let himself succumb to feeling instead. He thrust his fingers in and out of Holden, his free hand fumbling with the bag of toiletries that sat on the counter. When he found the bottle of lube, he unzipped his pants and pulled his cock out. Holden started to presumably make some quip about Amos keeping his clothes on, but the mechanic clapped one hand over his mouth and pressed his slick cock against his rim. He felt Holden’s shuddering breath hot against his palm.

He pressed in quickly, and he felt Holden’s teeth fastened on the fleshy part of his palm. Amos grinned ferally and bucked hard into him. He let his hand drop from Holden’s mouth, sliding it down his side and then digging his nails into Holden’s hip. Holden was staring at him through the mirror, his expression torn between open-mouthed pleasure and a savage grin to match Amos’ own. Amos liked this Holden. He liked when he let go, when he allowed feeling and sensation to wipe away higher thought. Amos felt a surge of fierce and feral love for the man that he quickly shoved aside. _It’s just sex_ , he thought in time with the snap of his hips. _Just bodies._

He could feel his orgasm approaching, and so he pulled Holden’s body up so that it was flush to his own. He wrapped a hand possessively around his jaw. “Do you like fucking me?” he said against Holden’s temple.

“Yeah,” the smaller man choked out. He met Amos’ gaze in the mirror, held it. Amos wanted desperately to look away, but he was hypnotized by those dark brown eyes. “I like doing everything with you.”

Amso felt his orgasm rip through him, dragging coherent thought down into spinning oblivion. He let it overcome him. He let it drag Holden’s words down with it; those he locked away in the deep recesses, along with the warmth they made flare in his chest. _Nothing valued is here._

He resurfaced, pulled out, and then spun Holden around and dropped to his knees. He lost himself in sucking him off, in the feeling of cold tile on his skin, in the way Holden’s hand twisted in his hair when he came, and in the soft “oh, fuck” that Holden whispered as if in agony.

Amos swallowed, stood, and wiped his mouth. He flashed Holden his trademark grin. The other man was breathing heavily, skin flushed and faintly shiny with sweat.

“You wanna stay for a bit?” Holden asked. Amos realized that he sounded hopeful. He clenched his jaw, let it relax, and then smiled wider and shook his head.

“Sorry, chief.”

Holden looked hurt. Amos ignored it. He zipped himself up, turned around, and headed toward the door just in time for Holden to ask,

“Did I do something wrong, Amos?”

He paused at the door. He did not want to answer that, but every fiber of his being was telling him to turn around and face Holden as if they were magnetically attracted. So he did, and he let his eyes glaze over when he saw Holden’s unhappy expression, and then he grinned again.

“Nope,” he replied cheerfully. Then he walked out the door, whistling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find me at pig-wings.tumblr.com for birds and general OT3 feelings.


	3. Interlude I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for canon-typical references to prostitution, child abuse, forced prostitution. This chapter can be skipped without affecting the story at all.

Here was the problem with trying to squash down memories and feelings—every time Amos shoved one down, another would bubble up. It was like trying to squeeze the air out of a bag. If you didn’t clamp down on the whole thing, then the pockets of air just moved around.

The first memory hits him like a punch. He is young. He is standing in front of a man. It could be Liev Andropoulous, his old pimp. It could be a john. He isn’t sure. All he knows is that the man is very tall, looming over him with a scowl. Timmy’s face is hot and wet. He’s crying, he realizes. He wipes a small hand over his snotty nose, stares up at the man. The man glares down at him, shakes his head, tuts disapprovingly. “I’ve told you before, haven’t I? What have I told you, Timmy?”

Timmy hiccups. “I don’t know.”

The man—it’s Liev, he’s sure of it now—brings his face impossibly close to Timmy’s. He feels like he can see every pore, every busted capillary in his eyes. He feels like he is looking at Liev through a magnifying glass, the image vaguely distorted but terrifyingly detailed.

“I’ve told you,” Liev says, “That crying is dumb, unless someone is paying you to do it.”

Timmy nods. Liev grins. His teeth are yellow from his tobacco habit. “Crying,” Liev continues, “Is a waste of time. Feeling sorry for yourself is a waste of time. You’ve got a roof over your head, don’t you? You’ve got food?” Timmy nods again. Liev spreads his hands wide. “Then you’ve got no fucking reason to cry.”

He straightens up and shoves his hands into his pockets. He looks amused now. Timmy sniffles and looks up at him. “What do you say?” Liev says, exasperated.

“Thank you, Mr. Andropoulus.”

“God damn right you should be thanking me,” Liev grumbles. He reaches out, tousles Timmy’s curls. It’s an awkward gesture. “One of these days, you’re going to think back on ‘ole Liev, and you’re going to think ‘wow, he was right all along’. No one on God’s green earth gives a damn about the feelings of street rats. It’s better to put a lid on that shit early.”

Timmy nods. Liev shakes his head again.

“Go wash your fucking face, kid.”

Another memory bubbles up. He and Naomi are drunk, holding each other close. Dancing. She is laughing, trying to guide him through the steps of a samba. “You have lead feet,” she complains. He just smiles back at her, shrugs apologetically. She laughs harder, her eyes crinkling up, her entire body shaking with the sheer force of her joy. She is warm against him, their hips wiggling together, his hand on her waist. She is beautiful, alight with her happiness. He wonders if human emotions can be passed skin to skin, if he can absorb her elation just by holding her hand. He wants desperately to share this with her. He wants to laugh with her. He wants to wrap himself around her, protect her so that she will never stop laughing.

She is laughing, she is laughing, she is laughing. He drinks it in. He bottles it up.

The bottom drops out of that memory, the image shattering like glass beneath his feet. Suddenly he is in the _Roci_ ’s galley. He’s fucking with the brace on his leg when the bomb drops—Holden logged the distress call. He looks at the smug bastard. It would be easy to drive the screwdriver through his jugular, let him bleed all over the table. Hell, Amos could probably snap his neck before anyone could react. The rage surges through him, boils, and then Naomi speaks. Her words hit him like bullets. She knew. She knew, and yet…

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks. There’s a lump growing in his throat. Something that shouldn’t be there.

“I don’t know,” she says, waving her hands.

But she _does_ know. Amos isn’t sure why, but he knows it deep in his gut, the same way he knows the basic laws of physics, the same way he knows the difference between a hex head and a flat head screwdriver.

“You were afraid of me,” he states. She doesn’t say anything. The lump grows and spreads, causing a tightness to creep into his chest. It’s painful, almost; he desperately wants the feeling to go away. It feels foreign. Wrong. Dangerous.

Amos stands to leave, and she still doesn’t say anything. It cuts him deeper than he will ever admit. It cuts him deeper than he thought possible, down to layers he didn’t know he had. Something repressed trickles out from his brain. He shoves it back in, hobbling away from the silent galley.

As he walked away from Holden’s room, Amos gathered these errant thoughts up, shook them each by their collars, and buried them back where they belonged. He did not linger on them. He did not allow himself to be shocked by them. He did not feed them. He simply pushed them back, shut the gate behind him, and walked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Double update? Double update! I wanted this to be a stand-alone thing, even if it is very short, so here we are. You can find me on tumblr at pig-wings!


	4. Chapter 4

Holden was sitting on the couch clicking mindlessly through the video feeds when Naomi returned from the spa. _Droughts in the Western American Trade Zone intensified this week due to_ —click. _Tokyo Titans won against the Berlin Cubs last night with a walk-off_ —click. _Watch out for the shrink ray, Marisko!_ —click. His hair was tousled, and he was wearing nothing but an undershirt and boxers. There was an open beer on the table in front of him. She raised an eyebrow.

“You’re taking relaxing seriously, huh?” she quipped, unsure how to greet him.

Jim clicked the feed off and turned to look at her. “Something’s wrong with Amos.”

His eyes swam with emotion. She could see that something had hurt him, but she also recognized the tightness in his face that came when he was working through complex problems. She put her belongings down and joined him on the couch, cuddling up against his shoulder with a heavy sigh.

“Yeah. I know.”

Holden wrapped an arm around her and squeezed her gently. A weak smile pulled at his lips. “You smell good.”

“Thanks,” she laughed. “Lavender. Good for stress, apparently.”

He made a noncommittal sound and then pressed his nose to her hair and breathed in. He stroked her arm absentmindedly.

“Amos came by. We had sex. It was sort of weird.”

“Weird?” Naomi felt a prickle of unease at that. She had the feeling that Holden wasn’t talking about the fun type of weird.

“He just…left after. He wouldn’t let me kiss him. It was, like…robotic, I guess. I know Amos can be a bit of a robot, sometimes,” he added quickly, “But not during sex.”

Naomi frowned. Truthfully, that didn’t sound that out of character for Amos; he didn’t attach the same intimacy and emotion to sex as many people did. But it had obviously upset Jim, and she believed him when he said that it had been different than their previous trysts. Plus, if he had gone to Jim right after their conversation after breakfast…

Holden must’ve seen some of her uncertainty creep across her face. “I asked if he would stay,” Holden elaborated. “And he just didn’t. Did he find you afterwards? He said he was going to.”

“No.” She worried her bottom lip. “I don’t think he’s thrilled with me right now.”

“Oh?”

“I pushed him. He didn’t handle it very well, at least by Amos standards. I think he actually got mad at me.”

“What’d you say?”

“I was trying to see if I could figure out what the issue is.”

“And?”

“He said he’s worried you have feelings for him. But I don’t think that’s the problem.” She paused. “I asked if the problem was him and he didn’t take that well.”

Holden grunted, nodded. He spent a minute combing over those words, pulling them apart, uncharacteristically silent.

“Here’s the thing,” Naomi said, drawing each word out. “If Amos was uncomfortable—if he thought you were pushing his boundaries—then he’d just say something. But there’s something he’s not saying, and I’m not sure what that is. I’ve been trying to figure out what could have sent him spinning, but I have no clue. The fact that he came to see you after we talked…”

Holden nodded again, hesitated, and then reached for his hand terminal. He commed Amos—no answer. Naomi wasn’t surprised, but Holden looked worried. He cast her a sidelong look, and she watched as he pulled up Amos’ location. She might’ve said something about respecting Amos’ privacy if Holden didn’t look so concerned.

The terminal said that he was in his room. That struck Naomi as odd. She had watched Amos work through things before. If there was some problem he was trying to work out, something he was trying to push away, then she would have put good money on him visiting the brothels. Amos used sex as a coping mechanism. She was familiar with his cycle of getting crabby, spending 48 straight hours in a brothel, and then returning to the ship as chipper as ever. It worked for him, even if she didn’t understand it. Brooding in his room? That was surprising. _Worrying_ , some corner of her mind supplied.

 _You know me_ , Amos had said. _You know me better than anyone._

“Alright,” she conceded. “I’m going to try and talk to him again. You should stay here, honey. I’ll be back.”

\---

It was a short walk down to Amos’ room. She knocked once on the door but got no reply. When she tried the handle, she found that the door was unlocked.

“Amos?” she called as she pushed the door open.

It was eerily quiet. She wondered if the hand terminal had glitched and if he wasn’t here at all. Then she stepped into the room and saw Amos sitting at the little table in the kitchenette, a glass by one hand, a bottle by the other. He was staring at nothing, his gaze empty, spine rigid and straight.

“Amos?”

No answer. She wasn’t sure if he even registered her presence. She could leave, wait for him to surface from whatever _this_ was. But thinking about leaving him just sitting here made her gut clench with guilt. The last time she could remember him seeing him shut down like this had been when he had tried to strangle Miller. But that had been so different—she had recognized Amos in that moment, known that he had been acting off of the animal instinct of self-defense. She didn’t recognize whatever this was, and that unsettled her.

Naomi walked toward the table, foot-falls heavy so as to not sneak up on the man. She was pretty sure that surprising him would land her in the hospital, or worse. She didn’t want to find out. She pulled out the chair across from his very slowly, and lowered herself down.

Amos finally seemed to see her then. His eyes snapped back into hard focus as if he had been caught in a daydream. “That you, boss?” he asked.

She gave him a feeble smile. The bottle of whiskey was almost half gone. She could smell the alcohol on his breath from here.

“Everything okay, big guy?”

“No. But it will be.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Nah, boss. No one on God’s green earth gives a damn about the feelings of street rats. It’s better to put a lid on that shit.”

She blinked. He recited the line as if he had read it in a book or heard it in a movie. Amos poured himself another finger of liquor and tossed it back. He poured another and drank that too.

“Okay, give me some of that, big guy.” She pulled the bottle closer to herself. Before she could overthink it, she took a swig in solidarity. Amos smiled politely and then asked:

“What does it feel like to want something?”

She nearly choked on the swallow of whiskey. Amos asked the question with the earnestness of a schoolchild, his eyes bright as he waited for her to answer. “What do you mean?”

“What,” he said again, slower, “Does it feel like to want something?”

She set the bottle down and looked at him closely. He was still smiling, his expression vast and empty. “Well, it depends on what it is that you want.”

Amos nodded. He seemed to consider something carefully in his mind, weighing it, measuring it. “What does it feel like to want some _one_?”

That surprised her. Was he talking about…?

“Like, romantically?” she asked. Amos nodded. She tried to think of some poetic way to put it, but she couldn’t find the right words. “It…it feels like they’re the only thing in the world. It feels like being apart from them would be painful. It feels…safe.”

Amos nodded again. He took the bottle back, pouring himself another drink. “How do you make it stop?”

Her heart seized in her chest. _Oh, Amos_. “Why does it have to stop?”

“Because it’s wrong.” Amos’ reply was too quick, but his tone was level. His smile was still stretched across his face.

She ached for him. She wanted desperately to find the people who had abused him and throw them all out of the Roci’s airlock. She wanted to open his skull up like a circuit board, tinker with his soldering until he realized that wanting things was normal. She knew objectively that wanting to change Amos was cruel in its own way—she would never force it upon him. But if _this_ was how he reacted to having a crush? If _this_ was how he reacted to wanting things for himself?

“You’re allowed to want things, Amos.”

“No,” he said, his tone polite but dismissive, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She hesitated, unsure how to respond to that. She wanted to dig deeper, find out why he thought it was a bad idea. She had the feeling that the answers were buried somewhere in their conversation this morning. Rather than risk upsetting him again, she reached out toward him with one hand. He watched the appendage closely, as if it might bite him. She met his gaze and then placed her hand on top of his own, feeling him try to move away before he relaxed into the touch. Hell, he practically melted into it. It felt like she was siphoning some of his tension away, absorbing some of his deeply buried pain. “Hey, Amos. I’ve got to ask you something. You don’t have to answer. But I’d like it if you did.” He blinked as if granting permission. “Is this about Jim? Do you…want Jim?”

There it was. Something flashed across Amos’ face, a torrent of emotion that lasted for a split second—want, jealousy, anger, desire. He poured himself another drink. His grin grew wider, stiffer. “It doesn’t matter what I want.”

She felt a hot lick of rage at whoever had taught Amos that. “But it does, Amos. It does matter. It matters to me. It matters to all of us. I know you. I know that you’ve told yourself that you can’t want things. I know it makes you feel safer to not want things. I _know_ , Amos. I _get_ it. A couple of years ago, I would have agreed with you. It _is_ safer not to want things. When you shut out the wants, the needs, then you don’t risk hurting yourself, or hurting someone else.” Something was boiling up in her, boiling out of her. He was staring down at their joined hands; she realized that her grip had grown so tight that it might have been uncomfortable. She didn’t relent. “But this isn’t the Cant. This isn’t hauling ice back and forth. This is something different. This is bigger. _We’re_ different. All of us.”

His eyes snapped up to meet hers. Her voice was rising. She wasn’t angry, not at him, but she couldn’t seem to control the words spilling from her lips. “If you want to keep living the way you do, if you want to pretend like you aren’t allowed to want basic human companionship and love, then you can keep doing that. But Jim and I sat in bed last night trying to figure out a fucking way to tell you how much you mean to us, Amos. Because we _want_ you. We _need_ you. I know you don’t do relationships. I know you don’t like getting involved. But fuck, Amos, maybe you could at least _try_.”

He was staring at her, face unreadable, silence stony. She inhaled deeply, forced the hot anger to leave her with the out-breath. Her grip on his hand relaxed.

“Would trying really be so bad?” she offered softly. “Would it be worse than this?” She gestured to the tableau of him and the bottle. _Would it be worse than punishing yourself every time you want something?_

Amos pulled his hand away, smiling. He was silent for a moment, and she let herself feel a foolish spark of hope. But the smile was the same one he always wore. It didn’t mean anything. It was impersonal, a mask.

“You might should leave now,” was all he said in reply to her speech.

She didn’t know what to say. Her throat was tight. She just nodded, stood, gave him a last look as if she was waiting for him to say something. But Amos eyes had already slipped back into emptiness, and even the fake smile was gone. The corner of her vision swam with tears. Naomi shut the door quietly behind her, wrapped her arms around her torso, and walked back to her room.

\---

There was bass. Beer. The smell of sweaty bodies. The world kept pulsing in and out of focus, throbbing like a headache. He smelled, oddly, lavender mixed in with the sweat.

Amos kept looking for a target, but none appeared. His throat was so tight that breathing was hard. He thought of Naomi, then pushed the image of her face away. Her words kept threatening to break through. He couldn’t let them, not now. If he thought about them—really thought about them—he was afraid that he would never surface.

He waited, drank, waited. The night wore on, and his throat grew tighter and tighter until he thought he was about to burst. When finally his patience waned, he paid his tab and left the club behind. The resort was quiet, the hour late enough that all but the most eager revelers had gone home. That was good. Fewer people around meant fewer witnesses.

He prowled the halls, desperately searching for a fight. Nothing. Just drunk vacationers having a good time, clinging to each other. No sleazebags or abusers or assholes for him to grind to a pulp. He was considering just jumping someone when an idea struck him, and he turned toward the hallway where Jim and Naomi were staying. He salivated with the promise of violence. His fists clenched in excitement.

When he arrived at their room, he pounded his fist hard against the door. He heard them both wake with a start, heard Holden muttering something. Amos counted the captain’s steps to the entrance, waited with bated breath as the locks clicked open, tensed his body in preparation to jump Holden when he opened the door…

Holden’s face appeared, sleepy, disheveled, and suspicious. He smiled when he realized that it was Amos outside. “Hey, brother,” he said very softly, voice rough with sleep.

Amos stared at Holden, fist raised. He felt something deep inside him snap, like a rubber band stretched too far. Anger surged, boiling, and then, suddenly, every muscle in his body relaxed. The deep-seated violence dissolved. The lump in his throat disappeared, replaced by an odd scratchy feeling. He was overcome then by a torrent of emotion, so powerful that it broke down his carefully constructed dams, flooded the deep chambers of the pits that held his memories. He lowered his fist, unsure why it had been raised in the first place. Holden blinked sleepy brown eyes at him.

Lydia’s voice came then, as sharp and clear as if she were standing next to him. He felt the phantom of her hand brushing across his chest, settling on his heart. _Who will you put there?_ she asked him again. The scent of saltwater hit his nose.

The flooding in his mind slowed to a trickle. His muscles felt like rubber. Amos sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Can I grab your couch?”

Holden blinked again, then smiled. “Yeah, big guy. Come on in.”

Naomi was standing in the living dressed in a pair of sleeping shorts and a tank top. She and Amos made eye contact, and he didn’t think he was imagining the relief in her eyes.

“Amos is going to grab the couch,” Holden explained to her. She nodded, then wandered back to the bedroom, returning with an extra pillow and a sheet and handing them both to him.

Amos sat down on their sofa, tossing the pillow and sheet to the side. He gave Holden and Naomi a crooked smile. “Thanks.”

Holden smiled, nodded, and then trundled back to the bed. Naomi waited for him to shut the door behind him before joining Amos on the couch.

She didn’t say anything; she didn’t need to. She just leaned her head against his broad shoulder and placed a hand on his thigh. He hesitated, then placed his hand on top of hers.

“Do you remember when I taught you Martian samba?” she mumbled into his shoulder after a minute.

He squeezed her hand. His heart felt lighter than it had in many years.

“Yeah, boss. I do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, a smidge of happiness after nearly 4 whole chapters of misery?! Thanks for reading. You can find me on tumblr at pig-wings.tumblr.com!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Y’know, Cap, I was coming to slug you last night,” Amos said flatly. Holden gave him a sheepish smile.
> 
> “Yeah, I figured that out this morning.” He paused. “Thanks for not doing that.”

Amos must have slept in because Holden and Naomi were already sitting at the small kitchen table when he woke, sipping at steaming mugs. He usually was the earliest to rise on the Roci, and he certainly was the lightest sleeper of the crew. He jolted up, a small surge of animal panic bubbling up. He didn’t like when others saw him sleeping. It made him unsafe, exposed. 

But then Holden and Naomi turned their eyes toward him, and the panic disappeared as quickly as it came. They smiled in unison, and Holden stood to make him a cup of coffee. Amos thought back to that day by the lake, dozing with his head in Holden’s lap, and summer warmth filled him. He watched Holden add creamer and sugar, just how he liked it, and it made him feel an emotion that he couldn’t name. Holden brought his coffee over and handed it to him. “Morning, big guy.” 

Amos mumbled a greeting in response around his mug. It was good coffee—he realized that they might be real beans, or at least the best synthetic blend that the Belt had to offer. They sat in companionable silence, Amos slowly waking, Holden and Naomi flipping through the newsfeeds at the table. 

“Y’know, Cap, I was coming to slug you last night,” Amos said flatly. Holden gave him a sheepish smile.

“Yeah, I figured that out this morning.” He paused. “Thanks for not doing that.” 

Amos grunted in reply. He prodded at his memories from last night like sticking his finger into a fresh wound. His gaze snapped over to Naomi, but she was looking at Jim. Amos recognized the questioning look of her face well. He felt like he had to say something to her, but he couldn’t find the right words. He tried to think about what Jim would say, but then he figured that he owed Jim an apology too. His stomach felt weird. Guilt, a voice in his head whispered. It sounded like Melba. 

Holden’s terminal chimed; he glanced down at it, then back up at Naomi. She stood, stretching with groan, and then said, “I’m going to hop in the shower. You and me today, okay big guy? Jim has a backlog of messages he’s been putting off.”

Holden frowned into his cup. “Vacation,” he mumbled in protest. 

“Yeah, something tells me that excuse won’t work on Avasarala.” She kissed Holden on the head as she walked to the bathroom; Amos heard the water start to run. He stood up from the couch and into the kitchenette. He pulled the coffee pot from the warmer and topped Holden’s mug up before sitting down in the chair Naomi had vacated.

Holden gave him a crooked smile, nodding his thanks and sipping at his coffee. They sat in awkward silence for a few moments. Amos blew out a sigh and slumped against the back of his chair.

“Yeah. So,” he said, running a hand through his beard. “I was an asshole yesterday.” 

“No. You were upset.”

“Yeah, well. That doesn’t preclude me from being an asshole.” 

Holden’s gaze fell back to his cup. Amos waited, then sighed again. He was sort of hoping that Holden would have some speech, like he always did. That he would give the ball the first nudge and Holden would keep it rolling. 

“You’re not usually quiet, Cap,” Amos said. It wasn’t the right thing, but he didn’t know what else to say. Holden’s frown deepened. Amos’ felt the thing in his gut grow colder. 

Holden breathed in deep, then pushed his mug away from himself. “I’m afraid I’m going to say the wrong thing and push you away again. But I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” Holden’s voice was rising, growing scratchy at the edges. “Whenever I fuck shit up, you’re not afraid to tell me. So I don’t get why you’re not just telling me now.” 

“Are you mad at me?” Amos asked, because he wasn’t sure what else to say in the moment. Saying more felt like opening a door he didn’t want opened.

“I don’t know, Amos, fuck!” Jim’s anger seemed to startle him; he blinked rapidly, then took a long swig of coffee to hide his miserable expression. “Sorry,” he said after he swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

Amos just blinked owlishly, waiting for Jim to say something else. He didn’t. Amos could feel a lump rising in his throat, the same one that had haunted him last night. No—not quite. It felt different, more painful. He opened his mouth to reply but found that he had to pause and swallow before he could speak. He wrapped both of his hands around the mug and stared down at his coffee.

“It’s not you, you know,” Amos mumbled, voice rough. “I would’ve told you if you were doing something wrong.” 

Holden lifted his gaze for a moment, then dropped it back down. Amos watched him relax into his chair a bit. He waited a beat, but Holden still didn’t say anything. He sighed, swallowed again. Like pulling teeth, he thought. 

“I do want to try,” Amos said. His voiced was small, smaller than he could ever remember it being. “I want to try being…being good to you and Naomi, if you guys will let me. It’s just, I ain’t ever done that sort of thing before. I’ve never wanted it ‘til now. Like, I guess I got why people wanted it. I always got why you and Naomi are together. But it was something that other people did, like, like…fuck, I don’t know, like when I was a kid and I thought leaving Earth was something other people did, whoop-de-fucking-do for them, but it wasn’t something I would ever do. Like that.”

“But you did leave Earth,” Holden offered softly. It took Amos a moment to understand his meaning.

“But yeah, the whole relationship thing? I ain’t ever wanted that before now. I still don’t know if that’s what I want. But I want you, and I want Naomi, and it’s not the same way that I want, like, a cold beer or something. It’s like…if something ever happened to either of you, I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t think I’d survive it, anyway. At least, I wouldn’t be the same after it.” His grip tightened on the mug. His chest felt very tight. “But I can’t give you and Naomi what you two already have together. I can’t do that. I can put a PDC back together and solder a circuit board and fix the coffee machine when you bust it, but I can’t be what you need me to be. And I can’t pretend to try. And that fucking sucks.” 

Amos felt his vision narrowing the same way it sometimes did during a high-G burn. He worked his jaw and heard the joint pop audibly. “Amos,” Holden was saying. Amos was suddenly aware that Jim’s hand was on his arm. “You don’t need to be anything other than what you already are.”

Amos blinked at him. “It ain’t enough. I know it ain’t enough.” 

Jim shook his head. He looked deeply sad, his fingers tracing one of the tattoos on Amos’ forearm absentmindedly. “I don’t want to force you into anything, Amos. I’m not going to sit here and convince you that you’re wrong and here’s a list of reasons why. I do think you’re wrong, for what it’s worth, but I don’t want to pressure you. That would be shitty of me. But…” he trailed off, a fond smile lighting up his face. “You make my life a lot better. I’m happier when you’re around.” 

Amos let himself digest that for a moment, let himself process how it made him feel. Then he stood, reached over the table, grabbed Jim by the front of his shirt, and yanked him upright. He heard the man grunt as his gut hit the edge of the table. Amos smothered his mouth with his own, biting, sucking, licking. He felt Jim’s hand reach up to tangle in his short hair. Jim kissed clumsily, caught off guard. Amos kissed like it was his last day alive. When they finally pulled apart, breathless, Jim’s face was pink and his lips shone with saliva. 

“You wouldn’t let me kiss you yesterday,” Holden said, breathless. 

“Yeah, well, I’m making up for it now.” Amos walked around the table, pulled Holden out of his chair, and then boosted him up onto the kitchen counter. Jim had to bend down awkwardly to meet Amos’ lips again, but he was smiling. Amos wanted to bottle it up, drink it so that it would always be a part of him, never leave him. He didn’t know if that counted as love. He figured that it was as close as he was ever going to get. Maybe that was alright. Maybe Jim and Naomi wouldn’t mind. 

Jim broke the kiss so that he could look down at Amos. “I was worried about you,” he said. He started to comb his fingers through Amos’ hair, exactly the same way as that day by the lake. Amos let his eyes close. 

“You don’t gotta worry about me,” he mumbled. 

“No, I guess I don’t.” Jim paused. “But I do.” He stared down at Amos, his eyes soft and fond. 

“Do you really have to work today?”

“No, not really. But I think Naomi wants to talk to you.” 

“Fuck,” Amos swore. “Think I used up all of my words for today already. Can’t we just get to the threesome stuff? That’s part of the deal, right?”

Holden laughed and playfully pushed Amos away so that he could hop down from the counter. He planted a kiss on Amos’ lips. He looked a little sad when he pulled away.

“I think you scared her yesterday.”

“Shit,” Amos said, letting his gaze trail off to the side. 

“It’ll be okay,” Holden soothed. “Go grab a shower, big guy.”

\-----

Holden was in the bathroom trimming his beard when Naomi stepped out of the shower. He had been letting it grow out a little, and it looked nice. She secretly theorized he was a little jealous of Amos, who could grow a full beard much easier than he could, but she kept that to herself.

“Hey there.” He paused in his grooming to let his eyes roam up and down her naked body. She pretended to look scandalized, and they laughed together. 

She grabbed a towel from the rack and began to dry herself off. “The beard looks nice, honey.”

“It’s still a little patchy,” he grumbled. 

“It’s gonna get patchier if you keep messing with it,” she chided. He sighed but rinsed the razor and put it down. Naomi run her fingers along his chin, and then pulled him in for a chaste, teasing kiss. “My handsome captain.” He wrapped an arm around her back and pulled her body flush against his, letting the towel fall between them. 

“Are you really going to make me answer comm requests all day?” he asked quietly. 

“Not all day. But we both know I need to talk to Amos.” 

“Yeah, I know.” Holden ran his hand over her damp head. “He’s okay, I think. He wants to try, but I think he’s a little freaked out by it all.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. We chatted while you were showering.”

She felt a weight lift from her shoulders. Sometimes, she couldn’t believe how far Holden and Amos had come since their first desperate days on the Knight. But Holden hadn’t given up on their relationship, and Naomi knew that the wells of Amos’ love went as deep as the ones for his anger. “That’s good,” she said. “Do you feel better?”

“Well,” Holden said with a sheepish laugh, “He did let me kiss him, so…”

Naomi couldn’t help but laugh too. She ran a hand over his cheek affectionately, patting it once, before sobering. “Jim, listen. There’s something I want to run by you.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

She took a deep breath. “Amos and I transitioning our relationship to something…physical…well, it’s a big deal with us. It’s a big step.” She saw his brow furrow an infinitesimal amount. “And as much as I want to have everyone involved—all three of us—I think that, for the first time, Amos and I need to be alone.” 

She saw a myriad of emotion flicker across his face—jealousy, sadness, the shadow of a disagreement perched on his lips—before the tension seemed to slip away from his body and he smiled, nodding. It struck her that the whole scene reminded her of Amos. “I think I get it.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. I think so. I mean, it’s like you said back on the Roci, before Amos and I went camping. You two have got stuff to sort out.” 

“I was expecting this to be more of a discussion, honestly.” 

Holden shrugged. “It bums me out a little, but that’s okay.” His face did look a little sad, now that he said that. “It’s…well, it’s something I need time to adjust to. I can be jealous. You know that.” 

She nodded, although she wanted to tell him that he didn’t know what real, toxic jealousy was. He wasn’t capable of that sort of venom.

“But there’s not room for jealousy in a relationship like ours,” he continued. “We all have to be equal partners to each other. All three of us. That’s the point. If we can’t do that, then we shouldn’t be doing this at all.” 

She was so proud of him in that moment, so unbearably fond of him and his anxiety over his own flaws and his unconquerable sense of righteousness. Naomi kissed him, soft and lingering, and she tried to convey all of her feeling through her lips, through the way her hands cupped either side of his face. “When did you get so wise?” she teased as she pulled away. 

“I didn’t let on, but I was upset when you went to talk to Amos alone. It hurt my feelings. Then I sat there and thought about this thing the three of us are trying to make, and I realized that I have some things to work on if this relationship is going to work.” 

She snuggled her face into her chest, breathing his scent in deep, letting it nurture her. “You’re special, Jim,” she said as she pressed a kiss to his clavicle. He laughed, and she could hear the smile in it.

“So are you.” He tilted her chin up with a finger as if he were about to kiss her. Instead, he pressed his lips to the shell of her ear and whispered, “I want details, though.”

Naomi laughed and swatted him. They went through the domestic routine of getting ready for the day, shoulder to shoulder. She kept thinking that something big had just happened, one of those many moments that defines the tapestry of a relationship. She wanted to dwell on that, comb through it, but Jim was chattering away about some program he had watched on the video feeds, and all she could do was smile.

\-----

When Amos got back to his own room, the first thing he did was throw the bottle of whiskey into the recycler. He glanced around his suite, much smaller than Jim and Naomi’s, and cleaned up remains of a half-smoked joint, a few empty beer cans, and a dirty plate. It occurred to him that he was ravenous; he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast yesterday. He rummaged through his bags until he found a squished protein bar and scarfed that down.

He showered, brushed his teeth so hard that his gums bled, and then pulled his electric razor from his toiletry bag. Carefully, he trimmed away the stubble that had crawled up his cheeks and down his neck. He stared at his reflection in the fogged mirror and sighed.

Lydia was there suddenly. “What’s wrong, little guy?” she said in a sing-song tone. The bracelets on her arms clinked together.

“I think I’m fucking this up, Lyds. I think I just dove off the deep end.” 

“Aw, honey!” He could smell her perfume. Feel her sheets on his skin. He felt clammy all over, stuck between too hot and too cold. “You think anyone cares about that?! You know how it goes, Timmy—no one on god’s green earth gives a damn about the feelings of street rats!”

Her tone was cutting. He felt his body tense all over, legs spreading to a stable stance, arms lifting. His breathing was coming too fast. 

“Real fucking helpful,” he hissed. 

Lydia just shrugged. “Why are you thinking about me, anyways?”

He heard the door to his suite open. His heart was hammering in his chest. “Amos?” Naomi called from the main room. The apparition of Lydia vanished. 

He breathed in deeply. “Just a sec, boss.” He put his razor away, washed the hair from the sink, and wrapped a towel tightly around his hips. Naomi smiled at him as he stepped out of the bathroom. She politely averted her gaze as he changed into pants and a worn grey t-shirt. He turned to face her when he was done, waiting for instruction, just as he always did. His heart rate had slowed, but the weird feeling in his stomach was back.

“Come sit with me,” Naomi said, seating herself on the edge of his bed. Amos hesitated. The taste of ginger flooded his mouth. Naomi patted the spot beside her, and he finally dropped down next to her. He looked around the room and ignored the fact that she was staring at him. 

“Amos,” she said quietly. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Amos, look at me.” 

He obeyed. Naomi smiled at him. Slowly, she reached her hand up to cup his cheek. Her finger gently brushed his cheekbone, and he leaned into her touch, letting himself melt into it. Into her. The tension began to melt and drip away, just as it always did around Naomi. He let himself chase the feeling of letting go. 

“I want to try, boss,” Amos said, his voice a whisper. “I want to try so bad.”

“Then we’ll try, Amos.”

“I’m gonna fuck it up. I can’t do that. I can’t do that to you and Holden.”

Naomi ran her hand down his face, his neck, down to his arms. She gave his bicep an affectionate squeeze. “Fucking up is just part of the deal, Amos. You’ll fuck up. I’ll fuck up. Jim will fuck up.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said mournfully. 

“I know,” she replied. “That’s why I love you.” And then she kissed him. 

The kiss caught him off guard. It was the sort of thing he had idly fantasized about countless times, but in his daydreams their kisses were always rough, consuming, a prelude to sex. This was entirely different. He felt himself reach for her, drawn to her steady energy. Prax had told him once that plants will bend toward sunlight. He thought of that and let himself bend to her. A thousand worries flitted through his mind, trying desperately to surface and sink their claws into him. But then there was her hand, so warm against his cheek. Slowly, she pulled out of the kiss. She smiled beatifically at him and he stared back at her. 

“What do you say, big guy? You and me?”

He found that her eyes were simultaneously impossible to look at and impossible to look away from. They held a depth of feeling that he knew he could not decipher, but warmed him nonetheless. He could never tell her what she meant to him. He didn’t know if there were even words for that sort of feeling. Holden would know. Maybe he’d ask. He settled on saying the best thing he could think of, the thing that felt true to him. 

“It’s always been you and me, boss,” he said, and then kissed her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, happiness! Hope you enjoy this update. It was a fun chapter to write! You can find me on tumblr at pig-wings.tumblr.com for Amos Appreciation and Cool Bird Facts.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What do you want?” she asked him.
> 
> He blinked up at her. “Whatever you want.”

Amos let Naomi guide him down so that they were laying on the bed. She straddled his hips, and he wrapped his hands around her ribcage. It was nice for a few minutes, Naomi thought. Just gentle kissing, exploring the wonderful feeling of Amos’ warm body pressed against her own. But she realized quickly that Amos wasn’t doing anything—he was just laying there, moving when she did, keeping his hands politely around her waist. She broke the kiss so that she could look at him.

His eyes fluttered open when she pulled away. Amos stared up at her, and the devotion reflected in his eyes made her breath catch. She had never felt worthy of the worship Amos paid her. The power he ascribed to her had always frightened her, because she had seen how easily other people could abuse that sort of power when she had been with Marco. She had witnessed it firsthand when Semi’s warm blood had splattered across her face. The thought sent a shiver through her body, but Amos didn’t seem to notice.

“What do you want?” she asked him.

He blinked up at her. “Whatever you want.”

Naomi pursed her lips. She rolled off him and sat up against the headboard, stretching her legs out so that their knees were touching. Amos looked at at her with a confused expression on his face.

“This isn’t going to work if we’re not equals,” Naomi said softly.

Amos’ gaze dropped. “I just don’t want to fuck this up. Sorta feels like I’ve already fucked it up, though.” Naomi started to say something in reply, but Amos brusquely continued: “I’m sorry about yesterday. That couldn’t have been easy for you.” 

“You don’t have to apologize for not being okay, Amos.”

She saw the corner of his lip twitch in annoyance. “See, everyone keeps saying that. Said the same fucking thing to Jim and he told me that it was okay because I was upset. But I’m not apologizing for…’not being okay’ or whatever the hell you want to call it. I was a fucking asshole to Jim. You were crying, and I booted you from my place. I’m apologizing for being shitty. Not for feeling shitty.”

Naomi pursed her lips. “So, do you want me to tell you that you were a huge asshole? Because you were. You were mean to Jim because you could be. You wanted to make him feel bad, and it worked. Then you used him to make yourself feel better about being an asshole, and that just made him feel worse. And yeah, you kicked me out of your place after I had laid all my cards on the table. Again, because you knew you could. You knew I wouldn’t say no. You knew I wouldn’t get mad.” Naomi paused and took a deep breath. “I was right, you know. This whole thing, it was about you. It wasn’t about me, or Jim. It was about you.”

Amos nodded sagely. His expression hadn’t changed the whole time she had been talking. His eyes wandered up to stare at the ceiling. It was quiet for a minute. Naomi tried to figure out if they were fighting, if she had hurt him. Part of her didn’t care if he was hurt—he had hurt them, after all.

She was trying to think of something to say when Amos beat her to it. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“For not letting me off the hook. I meant what I said. You know me better than anyone.”

And, simple as that, the tension drained from the room. Amos had the expression he got when he was thinking over a problem, and she could see the wheels turning in his head, but the annoyance was gone. She knew that he had taken what she had said to heart. He would do what he needed to do. Naomi supposed that this was why their relationship worked so well; Amos believed in what she said, and Naomi believed in his intentions. Jim would get his apology, or at least something close enough, and they were another step closer to tidying up the soldering on this new thing they were making. Her annoyance slipped away, and she couldn’t help the smile that crept across her face. She cuddled up against Amos, who obligingly pulled her to his side. They sat in silence for a minute or two, just enjoying the slow sound of each other’s breathing.

“Hey, boss,” Amos said. When Naomi turned to reply, he gently tilted her chin up and caught her in a lingering kiss. Tender was not a word she thought she would ever used to describe Amos Burton, but it was the only word that came to mind now. Naomi let herself melt into it.

When they separated, Amos asked, “What were you thinking for today?”

Naomi laughed. “I was thinking about sex, to be honest. But that feels sort of weird now.”

Amos blinked at her like she had just spoken a foreign language to him. “Why would it be weird?”

She balked, then laughed again. How quintessentially Amos. “I guess I forgot who I was dealing with.” Amos tilted his head ever so slightly. She pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “Come on, big guy. Let’s do this.”

Amos grinned and then reached over and scooped her onto his lap. She wriggled her hips suggestively against his and bent forward to kiss him.

She was surprised when he placed his hands on his hips to still her. “Should we call Holden?” he asked. _These boys_ , Naomi thought with a shake of her head. She placed a soft kiss on Amos’ lips.

“I already talked to Jim. If me and Jim can have sex alone, and you and Jim can have sex alone, then you and me can have sex alone too. I guess I sort of wanted our first time to be just the two of us.” She was a little embarrassed by that now. It felt like the sort of sentiment Amos wouldn’t understand.

But Amos’ smile just grew wider. “I’m alright with that.” And then he pulled her down so that he could kiss her in earnest.

The hesitation from before was gone. Amos kissed possessively now, nipping and sucking at her lower lip, pressing his tongue insistently against hers. He let his hands travel up and down her body, caressing the lines of her arms and then traveling down her back so that he could cup her ass and encourage her grinding on his growing erection. When she pulled away to catch her breath, Amos turned her head so that he could nibble and suck at her earlobe. She wondered how often Amos had fantasized about this; it seemed like, now that he had her, he didn’t want to let her go.

 _She_ had fantasized about it on more than one occasion, late at night when she was trying to lull her mind to sleep. She had always found Amos attractive, and the two had chatted about sex enough times that she could paint a few pictures in her mind. She knew, for example, that Amos liked taking charge. She also knew that he was up for pretty much anything so long as everyone was on board. Naomi had pried about that once. “ _Do you really mean anything_?” she had asked. Amos had looked thoughtful for a moment and said, “ _Sure, mostly. People are so embarrassed about what they like, what they want. I like to help them ask for it. I mean, I’m not going to let anyone piss on me, if that’s what you’re getting at_. _”_

Naomi shivered, thinking about the possibilities. 

“You know what’s nice?” she asked. Amos grunted in reply and moved his lips to her neck. “You and me, we’ve talked about our hookups so many times that we don’t even have to do that awkward thing where we pretend that we don’t know what the other likes.”

That piqued Amos’ interest, as she knew it would. “Oh?” he inquired, pulling away from her neck so that he could look at her. She shrugged coyly with her hands, and then quickly snatched his wrists and pinned them up over his head. His eyes went wide for a moment before he bared his teeth in a savage grin. “Yeah, Nagata?” Amos made a show of flexing against her grip, though she knew that, if he really wanted to, he could break free easily.

“Yeah, Burton,” she parroted. “Unless you’ve got something different in mind.”

Quick as a flash, Amos tore free from her grasp and pitched her forward onto his chest with a buck of his hips. His hands made fast work of her shirt and bra, which he tossed to some corner of the room. Before Naomi could comprehend the shift in power, Amos’ mouth was on her breast and his tongue teased her nipple. She gasped, then moaned and pressed her hand against the back of his head, pressing him to her breasts. His eyes flicked up to meet hers knowingly. She forced him to her other breast, and he made a low sound in his throat and sucked.

This time, she was ready when he tried to shift again. Amos tried to use his bulk to push her down onto the bed; she let him, but managed to scoot up at the last second so that his face was between her legs. His growl of frustration into her thigh made her giggle. When he sat up and pulled her back down by her legs, she happily let herself fall under him.

“If you want me to eat your pussy, you have to let me take your pants off first,” Amos said, halfway between light teasing and an open challenge. His hand fell to the waistband of the loose-fitting linen pants she was wearing; she lifted her hips to help him remove them along with her underwear. She shivered, suddenly feeling vulnerable under his gaze.

“Goddamn,” Amos said. His tone and gaze were worshipful, and he ran his hand up her body as if touching a relic. She wanted to make some quip, to break the sanctified tension. But then Amos pulled her to the edge of the bed and any words she was about to say died in her throat. He dropped to his knees as if in prayer and pressed his mouth to her sex.

“Amos—” Her hand jerked down to the top of his head. It was almost too much, having gone from zero stimulation to the enthusiastic lapping of Amos’ tongue. He squeezed her thigh as if in reassurance but didn’t stop in his work. His eyes were shut, face slack. Naomi couldn’t help but watch him. As if he sensed her, his eyes snapped open and he snared her gaze in his own. Amos pressed his tongue against her clit, and she wasn’t sure if the shudder that ran through her body was from pleasure or from the cool intensity of his stare.

She was surprised by how quickly her legs started to tremble. Amos didn’t break eye contact, and she found that she could not look away either. “Amos,” she said again weakly. He slowed the movement of his tongue, drawing languid circles around her clit and looking as if he were waiting for instruction. She breathed in deep, let it out slowly. “Don’t stop,” she whispered. His eyes fluttered shut as he licked a broad stripe up her cunt. She moved her hips to guide him to the best angles, and she felt his hands flexing and twitching on her thighs in his own excitement. Naomi thought about him fucking her, and then she thought about Amos and Jim fucking her, and then she came with his name on her lips and her hands gripping his short hair. Without slowing the motion of his tongue, Amos plunged a thick finger into her wetness to feel her clenching walls.

Slowly, the world began to focus again, and the waves of pleasure subsided until she had to push Amos away from her oversensitive sex. He withdrew his finger and licked it clean with a cheeky smile and a swipe of his tongue. Naomi pulled him back up to her so that she could kiss the taste of her wetness from his mouth; Amos obliged, wresting control of the kiss, sucking her lower lip before he pulled away. Naomi looked at him. In a way, it felt like she was seeing him for the first time.

“You are very overdressed,” she giggled, tugging at his shirt and pants. He tilted his head in acknowledgement, assisted her in pulling off his shirt. She ran reverent hands over his chest until he stood to discard his pants and undergarments. His cock was thick and flushed, the tip already glistening with precum. He smirked as she openly admired his figure and then laid back down, covering her body with his own and capturing her lips in another smothering kiss.

Naomi reached down to stroke his erection. He made a low sound and pressed himself into her gentle grip, rutting languidly into her hand. One of his hands wandered back down to her pussy. He dragged a finger up and down her lips before swirling it against her opening. “I like the way you taste,” Amos whispered against the shell of her ear. She shivered, then moaned as he pressed a finger inside. “I like the way you feel.”

Amos added a second finger and fucked her slowly on his hand, his breath hot, his eyes filled with dark heat. He was a different lover than Jim without a doubt. They were each worshipful in their own way, each possessive in their own way, just as she was possessive of them. But Amos had a wilder energy about him, a rougher edge. She liked the drag of his calloused fingers across her skin. She liked the way in which he nipped at her ear, her jaw, pressing and rubbing himself against her body as if he couldn’t help himself. An image flashed into her mind of Holden pressed down beneath his body, filled with Amos’ cock and moaning as the mechanic pounded him into the bunk. She moaned and squeezed the head of his cock, and Amos pistoned his fingers in response, grunting.

“The three of us,” she half murmured, half moaned. “Tonight.”

Amos, who had been sucking on her neck, pulled away. His cock twitched in her hand. “Yeah?” he asked, then chuckled lowly. “Damn, boss. I thought I was the resident horndog.”

She thought about just laughing it off, directing his lips back to the hickey he had started to suck into her neck. To say what she was thinking aloud felt illicit, a step beyond her usual level of dirty talk. But it was Amos, who never judged, who seemed determined to pay her tribute in any way that she allowed.

“I can’t stop thinking about you fucking Jim,” she choked out.

Amos went rigid along her body and let out a shuddering breath. “Fuck.” His voice was rough, clearly affected by the fantasy. Then, a wicked smile lit his face. He slowed the motion of his hand, teasing, crooking his calloused fingers against her walls. “Your boyfriend likes it rough, you know.”

She gyrated her hips on his hand, rocking her clit against the heel of his palm. “Something we all have in common, I guess.”

His grin grew wider. Amos made a humming noise, pulling his fingers from her and then dragging his hand up her body, up to her breasts. He bent his head down to tease first one nipple, then the other with his tongue. “Tell me what’s going to happen tonight,” he whispered against her skin.

Before she could answer, Amos deftly maneuvered them so that she was atop him again, straddling his hips. Naomi stared down at him, her head spinning from the sudden shift. Embarrassment crept back up her throat at Amos’ request; she swallowed it down and focused on the feel of his body shifting beneath her. “You’re going to come over to our room. We’re going to get a bottle of sake.” She lifted her hips and pressed her pussy down onto his cock. Amos let out a soft noise, eyelashes fluttering. “Then…you and Jim are going to make me cum.”

“Bossy,” Amos teased, his voice a whisper.

“And you like it that way.” She punctuated this by rocking her hips and Amos groaned his agreement. Naomi continued, “You two are going to make me come, and then you’re going to fuck Jim.”

“And you’re going to watch?” Amos asked hopefully.

“I’m going to _help_ ,” she corrected. Amos grinned. “Let’s spoil him tonight, yeah?”

Amos looked so earnest, so genuinely excited by the idea. “After you made him work all day,” he said, grinding his hips up against her heat. She scowled and silenced him with a kiss.

They stayed like that for a few minutes, her pussy sliding along his length, their lips tangling, occasionally breaking apart so that they could suck hickeys onto each other’s necks. “Lay down on your back,” Amos said into the curve of her jaw. Naomi complied, shivering with what she knew was coming next. Amos covered her with his body, bracketing her in with his strong arms, and tested her once more with his probing fingers. “I’ve wanted to fuck you for a long time,” he growled, lips brushing the shell of her ear.

A shudder ran down Naomi’s spine. “Show me, then.”

Amos made a deep, low noise in throat, and then the fat head of his cock was pressing for entrance.

They both moaned as he sank in. Amos swore lowly under his breath, and Naomi dug her nails into his spine. It was just sex, the sort of coupling they had each experienced dozens of times. But it was _them_ , Amos and Naomi, and it felt both new and familiar, illicit and benign. It was them, together. The weight of the moment washed over Naomi, but it felt warm and right. She and Amos were lovers now, but she knew nothing would change. They were more solid than bedrock, more time-tested than the laws of physics.

Amos rolled his hips. His face was pressed into her neck, his breath hot against her skin. Jim did the same thing, she realized; he hid as if he couldn’t let her see his pleasure. She pressed her hand against Amos’ nape, and he gently pressed his teeth against her pulse point. He began to move in earnest, picking up the rhythm, guided by the encouragement of her legs wrapped around him, urging him to drive home harder.

He pressed a sucking kiss against her neck and then propped himself up on his forearms so that he could put his weight behind his thrusts. “Yes,” Naomi moaned, wrapping her legs more tightly around him, dragging her nails down his flexing spine. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“Fuck,” Amos said, voice rough. He bent his head down so he could kiss her, the movements frantic, desperate. He paused now and then to grind deeply into her, causing that cocktail of pain-pleasure to light a spark in her body. Whenever he did, she pressed her lips to his more fervently, trying desperately to communicate the feeling.

Eventually, Amos slowed the snap of his hips. Naomi had just begun to savor the slower, gentler fucking when Amos managed to pull her up. Now she was sitting on his lap, looking down at his sweaty face. His eyes were dark with pupil, and a pink blush had spread from his cheeks to his neck to his sternum. Once again, Amos stared at her like she was holy. She rocked her hips, taking in the way his hooded eyes regarded her. Then, she clasped him by the shoulder and rode him fast and hard until her own breath was coming in staccato bursts.

The angle was such that she could grind her clit against him with every stroke. She chased the high, let it spiral upwards, let it guide her passion. The tension within her began to build, swell. She reached up to cup his face, forcing their gazes to meet. His expression threatened to overwhelm her. She wanted to tell him how much he meant to her, how he had saved her, in a way, how they had saved each other. The word that did come out surprised her.

“Mine,” she said, and the dark intensity of her own voice was startling.

But Amos didn’t hesitate; he just looked up at her, worshipful, desperate, true. “Yours.”

Her second orgasm barreled over her. Amos exclaimed as her walls pulsed around him. He wrapped his hands around her hips and thrust up into her, chasing his own release, until he too came with a long, rasping moan.

Time was syrupy for a while. They sat embraced, letting their sweat mingle and dry together. Eventually Amos pulled himself from her and gently pushed her down so that they could lay side by side. One of his hands traced circular patterns on her hip. His pupils were still blown, eyes unfocused. When he saw her looking at him, his mouth broke into his crooked smile.

“Hey,” he said.

She blinked, then smiled back. “Hey.”

They stared at each other for a few moments, as if assessing how the other was feeling. Finally, Amos lifted an arm up in invitation. “Come here.”

She was more than happy to oblige. Naomi snuggled against his side, taking in the smell of their combined sweat, the warmth of his body. She was not aware that she had fallen asleep until she jerked awake after some time. Disoriented, she looked over and found Amos sleeping beside her. His face was slack, more peaceful than she had ever seen it. His lips moved almost imperceptibly as he muttered something in his sleep. Overcome by her affection, she pressed a kiss to his cheek.

“Boss?” he mumbled, stirring at her touch.

Naomi smiled. Content, she snuggled back down into the bed. Amos reached one hand out to touch her back. His touch grounded her, just as it always did, and she slipped back into a pleasant doze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I love writing Amos and Naomi together. I successfully defended my thesis for my graduate degree, so I'm hoping to update a little more regularly again. There will be a very short interlude chapter posted some time in the next few days before the next big update.
> 
> You can find me at pig-wings.tumblr.com for Amos Appreciation and Cool Bird Facts.


	7. Interlude II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was motion, and then there was not.

**The Slow Zone -- weeks prior**

There was motion, and then there was not. There was gravity, and then there was not. There was pain, and then there was more pain, until the pain overwhelmed every synapse in Amos’ body and all of his biological systems went red and began to shudder and falter in panic, shying away as best as they could from the sense of Bad and Wrong and Dying that the endorphins and testosterone and adrenaline tried desperately to shut down. He was awake, and then he was not. He was aware, and then he was not.

He lived in this halfway state for who knows how long. The world around him would brighten and darken in turn. When it brightened, he could hear alarms going off across the ship. He could also feel that something in his skull was not quite right. That was less worrying than the alarms. He didn’t recognize the sound of them, so he knew something bad had happened.

When the world darkened, he lost track of everything. He floated in this odd in-between state he found himself in, feeling very at peace. He could not feel his body, but that didn’t bother him. It felt like everything _was_ his body; it felt like his atoms had drifted apart. Snatches of memories played in his head, coming in the form of taste and touch and smell, rarely in images. The taste of ginger. The smell of shitty black coffee. A saltwater breeze that left his skin feeling a little gritty. It was all pleasant enough, he supposed. Some of the snippets—the squeak of bedsprings, his hands around someone’s neck, a whiff of ozone—left him feeling weird, hollow. But, the weirdness dissolved into the darkness that surrounded him and he let himself drift again. He didn’t let the weird feelings bother him, not for long, at least.

It was nice for a while. He didn’t feel anything. He just was. He wondered if he was dead, if this was what being dead was like. He didn’t mind, not really. It was all pleasant enough.

But soon the brightness came more often, and with the brightness came the overwhelming pain. Red light would flood his eyes, the sirens would wail their complaints, and pain would explode in every cell in his body. He’d wrestle with it, struggle to tamp it out, and then the endorphins would drag him under again, trying desperately to shove the physical trauma under the metaphorical rug. During one of these wakeful periods, he remembered that Alex was somewhere on the ship with him. Oh, he thought. That might be a problem. It felt like his thoughts were very far away, a conversation in a restaurant that he could just overhear.

He wondered what Alex was doing.

Amos’ skull was starting to throb. There was a pressure building up behind his eye that seemed to grow worse with every passing moment. An image of Baltimore flashed in his mind—Oestra, his head beneath Amos’ foot. He felt his finger dig into the eye socket, heard Oestra scream again. To this day, he was still surprised that you could rip a man’s eye out so easily. Bad design. His thoughts spooled out again, dissolving into incoherence.

Holden was off doing what he did. Naomi was off saving herself. He missed them, he supposed. The feeling was as close to “miss” as he could muster. The ship felt empty without Naomi, foreign now that Holden was gone. If he was dead, he supposed that he wouldn’t see them again. Shit, he thought. They’d have to clean up his body if they came back. That would be a royal pain in the ass.

Suddenly, he was aware of a voice. A voice that was saying his name, over and over. Naomi’s voice. Oh, he thought again. I really am dead. He wondered if that meant that Naomi was dead too. The thought made him a little sad. It seemed like Naomi still had a lot of shit to sort out before she died, but maybe being on the Behemoth helped with that. Shame, though.

But then her hands were on his chest, his face, and they were warm and real. She was saying his name again. _“You have to say something.”_ He tried to open his eyes, but the endorphins were trying to drag him down into blissful oblivion. He tried to claw himself back up to no avail. He grasped at his mind like a drowning man searching for a piece of driftwood, a rope, something. The darkness pushed him down, soothing and cool.

Fuck this, he thought, and then he let the pain in.

When he opened his eyes, Naomi’s face was limned with red light and blurry. He couldn’t make out her features, but a deep, instinctual part of him knew that it was her. The sound of her voice, the vague outline of her jaw, the tempo of her breathing. Once, when he had been especially bored on a long-haul trip, he had watched a documentary about people raising baby animals, and how sometimes the baby animal would imprint on the human caretaker and treat them as if they were the same species. He didn’t understand why his mind decided to conjure that memory up suddenly.

Something deep inside him relaxed when he saw her. Part of him knew that it might be a hallucination, an image conjured up by his dying brain to make dying suck less. But at least her hand was warm on his cheek. At least it felt like she was there, even if she wasn’t. If he wanted to die with anyone by his side, he would always choose her. Amos tried to get his eyes to focus on her face but couldn’t. The only thing that stood out to him were bright purple splotches mixed in with her curls. That was new. He liked it.

“You changed your hair,” he croaked out at last. It was not the right thing to say. But, hell, maybe you get a free pass to say whatever the fuck you want when you’re dead.

He saw her smile before his mind dragged him under again. She pressed her face to his and it was warm, and it was alive, and it was Naomi, home at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the short interlude I promised! These are very fun to write so expect a few more to pop in between chapters. Thank you for reading, and you can find me on tumblr at pig-wings.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His mistake—their mistake, that voice corrected—was that they hadn’t talked about what had happened, and now they were complicating things, even if said complications came in the form of a man who they both loved very much.

He knew, objectively, that what he was doing was not good, not healthy. But Holden found that he couldn’t help it. His overactive brain was running haywire, and the queue of communications he had sat down to listen to sat untouched. The hand terminal chirped occasionally, letting him know there was a message waiting. He just fiddled with it, opening apps, closing them, opening them again, and so on.

He knew what his mistake was. Or, maybe it wasn’t a mistake. Regardless, he knew where the feelings were sprouting from, and it only highlighted to him how hypocritical they were. Amos and Naomi were off doing…whatever. Having sex. Talking. He wasn’t sure. He sat at the same kitchen table he and Amos had sat at that very morning, drinking coffee, kissing deeply. But now, some dark feeling was chewing at his gut. It was some weird hybrid of jealousy and fear and guilt and deep-seated sadness, a feeling he could not name, a feeling he had never felt before. Doubt, a voice in his head whispered. But that wasn’t quite it either.

He didn’t want her to leave him, not again. That was the hole this terrible feeling had crawled from. They had just been reunited after the Slow Zone incident, back together after far too long apart. Holden hadn’t known if she was coming back. He knew that there was more to Naomi than he could ever know, more beats to her past than she would ever share. He knew that, and he respected it. But the gnawing hollowness her absence had left in his chest had threatened to overwhelm him. He had missed her terribly, more than he could ever find words to tell her. And, he had learned that she _could_ leave. That knowledge made him feel uneasy.

His mistake—their mistake, that voice corrected—was that they hadn’t talked about what had happened, and now they were complicating things, even if said complications came in the form of a man who they both loved very much. Holden and Naomi had fallen into each other, folding inwards, letting the horrors of what they had seen fall away like an old skin. They had not discussed what it had felt like when they were apart, not in depth. He hadn’t admitted to her how lost he had been, how deeply terrified he had been that she would never come back home. He had not told her how much it hurt him that she could just walk away, but that he understood, too, and that he didn’t hold it against her. He didn’t tell her any of this. Holden thought that the feelings had gone away. He thought that the only thing that mattered was her return. But no—the feelings had never left. They had just hibernated, curling themselves into tight balls and plugging the holes in his chest. Today, when Amos and Naomi were off being together, was apparently their first day of spring, and they were waking up in fits and starts.

 _They sure are close_ , a velvety voice whispered to him. _Amos and Naomi—they know each other so well._ And it was true, of course. _It would be such a shame if they didn’t need you anymore._

That won’t happen, Holden thought back. But still, the mere suggestion, venomous as it was, left him uneasy. Amos and Naomi had a type of relationship he had never seen before. Her words from a few nights ago came back to him suddenly _—when I thought Amos was dead, it was like a part of me died too._

He wondered if she had felt the same way when he had been on the alien station. He willed the thought away before he could dwell on it. Nothing good could come of that.

It was a bad mistake, a critical failure. He and Naomi had not talked, and now here he was, staring at his hand terminal, so deeply sad that she was off without him. He had told her this morning that he could be jealous, but he had not anticipated this incredible, saturating grief. It made him feel terribly guilty. This was not how their relationship was supposed to go. It wasn’t as if he owned either of them, anyway. He needed both of them with a ferocity he had never felt, but people needed all sorts of things that they could never own.

Holden breathed in deeply, and then he began to sketch out the situation. He, Amos, and Naomi wanted to be in a relationship. He and Naomi were already in a relationship. Amos and Naomi had shared a bond that was as fierce and hot as a drive plume. He and Amos shared a bond that had been forged in blood and gunpowder and the soft drumming of a black and white woodpecker. He inhaled again, letting the action ground him. He loved them, and he didn’t think that he could live without them. Here, he paused. He thought they loved him, too, but they didn’t say it. It was hard for Naomi, and he understood why. He didn’t think the thought of ‘love’ had ever really crossed Amos’ mind. He could not hold these facts against either of them—he knew how wrong it would be to do so—but he realized that he couldn’t help it if the facts made him feel a little bad. He breathed in again, breathed out.

You want them to tell you that they love you and need you too, a more helpful voice supplied. That was it, the crux of this feeling. He knew they did—but he needed to hear it, too. Just this morning, he had told Amos how he worried about him. Amos had not said that he worried about Jim too. Again, objectively, Holden understood why he didn’t. But he could not help if he felt as if he was draining his own well dry without having it replenished.

“Okay,” he said aloud. “Action plan.”

Holden stared at his hand terminal, starting to compose how best to broach the topic with the topic with the two of them. He realized that he kept coming up blank. How do you tell two of the people that you love the most that you respect them for who they are, while also needing them to change to make you happy? How do you begin to broach that without hurting those people? Without being selfish?

He worried the corner of his nail, racking his brain for a way to have this conversation. Then, he picked up his hand terminal and messaged the most endless well of advice he had ever known.

TO: MOTHER ELISE

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU HAVE A COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN IN YOUR RELATIONSHIP?

He waited, and then his hand terminal chimed.

TO: HOLDEN

YOU BUY A BOTTLE OF WINE, YOU ACCEPT THAT THERE MIGHT BE HURT FEELINGS, AND THEN YOU AND NAOMI SIT DOWN AND TALK UNTIL YOU’RE BOTH BLUE IN THE FACE.

He chewed his bottom lip, and then typed out:

TO: MOTHER ELISE

WHAT IF IT’S WITH EVERYONE—YOU, SOPHIE, ANTON, AND JOSEPH?

Another wait, another chime.

TO: HOLDEN

THEN YOU BUY A BOTTLE OF WINE, YOU ACCEPT THAT THERE MIGHT BE HURT FEELINGS, AND THEN YOU, AMOS, AND NAOMI SIT DOWN AND TALK UNTIL YOU’RE ALL BLUE IN THE FACE.

He couldn’t help but smile at the screen. “Thanks, Mom.” His phone chimed again.

TO: HOLDEN

RELATIONSHIPS ARE HARDEST WHEN THEY’RE NOT QUITE NEW, BUT NOT QUITE OLD EITHER. IT DOESN’T MATTER IF IT’S A RELATIONSHIP OF ONE, TWO, OR EIGHT PEOPLE. YOU HAVE TO FIND A COMMON LANGUAGE TO SPEAK. THEN, OVER TIME, YOU LEARN TO INTERPRET THE LANGUAGES EVERYONE ELSE IS SPEAKING.

He started at the message. Something about it made his heart clench, though he couldn’t say why. Mother Elise had always been good at parsing his true meanings out of whatever vague questions he asked her. He messaged her back to thank her and then slipped his hand terminal into his pocket.

Holden took a deep breath in and held it until his head became a little swimmy. He immediately felt better; some of the guilty feeling was gone now that he knew he wasn’t some jealous monster. Feeling lighter, he grabbed his jacket and left to purchase a bottle of wine.

He came back with wine and all of the ingredients for the three of them to cook a nice dinner together—red curry, which he knew Naomi especially loved. It was an Alex recipe, but he thought he remembered the basic ingredients. It would be a good excuse to give the pilot a call, anyways. They had exchanged a few messages, but Holden hadn’t wanted to intrude on Alex’s reunion with his cousins on Mars. The one time he had called, Alex had been drunk, country music had been blaring on the speakers, and he could hear a raucous crowd of line dancers shuffling somewhere in the bar. He smiled at the memory and sent him a message to let him know he was making the recipe.

After he had put everything away, he looked around the empty room. His energy seemed to vanish then. Walking into the living room, he glanced at the couch Amos had slept on last night. The sheets were balled into one corner. Holden sighed and folded them into a neat square.

It distracted him, for a minute. He tried to decide if he should leave the sheets on the couch or toss them into the laundry. He opted to leave them on the couch, just in case. Hoping, maybe. He wasn’t sure. He trundled over to the coffee maker and poured himself a fresh cup, surveying the central room of their suite for some other job he could do.

Eventually, he did plunge into the queue of calls he had been putting off. Most were requests for quotes, stories, any images he may have. He filtered those into their own separate folder. One comm was from Monica with a clip from the documentary. He deleted it without watching it. A few of the comms were offers for shipping and transport contracts. Those, he sent to the group feed for the _Roci_. He had a feeling everyone would reject them; it seemed like they could use a break, and they had money to spare between their savings and the money from the documentary team. Another few weeks, and the itch to do something would be back. Alex first, because he could never be out of the pilot’s chair for long. Then himself, because he knew he couldn’t sit still for long. Naomi would be last to feel the urge, and Amos always followed suit after her. His hand terminal chimed with a response. Amos had replied with an elegant “WTF NO”.

Around when his stomach began to grumble, the door to the suite swung open and Naomi and Amos walked in. Holden perked up as they entered. He scanned them for some sign that things had changed between them. He didn’t know what he had been expecting—some animal pheromone instinct, maybe. But Amos and Naomi looked the same as they always did, with Naomi leading the way and Amos following behind her with a bag nestled in his arm.

“We come bearing gifts,” Amos said as he placed the bag down on the kitchen island.

“Frankincense and myrrh?” Holden quipped.

“What? No. Booze.” Amos reached into the bag and pulled out two things. He lifted the bottle of sake with one hand, “This is for us,” he said, wiggling it, “And this is your beer.” In his other hand, Amos had a six-pack of an Earth beer Holden enjoyed but could rarely find in the Belt. The mechanic met his gaze. Holden recognized it for what it was—a peace offering. He smiled at Amos, trying to muster all of the warmth he could. Amos’ eyes just clicked away, his expression as unreadable as ever.

Naomi walked over so that she could snake an arm around Holden’s hip. Amos watched the action closely, his brow furrowing almost imperceptibly. “Did you have fun answering calls?”

Holden grimaced. He hoped they thought it was about the calls. Naomi laughed and pressed a kiss against his cheek. Amos was still intently watching them with the same expression, Holden realized, that he had worn when Holden had taught him how to swim. Amos’ words from that morning—god, had that conversation really only happened twelve hours ago?—came back to him. _I can’t give you and Naomi what you two already have together._

Amos was looking for the behaviors he could pick up, the ways in which he should be acting if he was going to try his hand at a relationship with both of them. It was both endearing, because it was a quintessentially Amos behavior, but it made Holden sad as well. He didn’t want Amos to feel pressure to act a certain way. 

But…hadn’t he just been _thinking_ that, before they had come back? Hadn’t he just been thinking of a way to tell Naomi and Amos that he needed something from them, something he knew they may both find hard to give?

His heart sank. He couldn’t have the conversation he had been intending to have with them now, even if the urge was eating him alive. He was still afraid of driving Amos away—driving Naomi away, even. It would have to wait. He swallowed his disappointment.

“I was thinking,” he said, pouring a bulb of coffee for Amos and handing it to the man, “That it’s been a crazy past few days, and maybe we could relax tonight.”

Amos and Naomi glanced at each other like they were sharing a secret. Naomi teased her nails up Holden’s spine. “That sounds nice.”

“I got us stuff to cook dinner,” he continued earnestly. “Curry. I thought that’d be nice. A little date night for the three of us.”

“Date night,” Amos parroted slowly, like the words were new to him.

“It means you gotta keep it in your pants for a bit, big guy,” Naomi supplied. Amos grinned wolfishly.

Holden shifted against the kitchen counter. “Maybe over dinner we could…chat about all this? What it means, how we’re going to tell Alex, ya’know?”

Amos waved a hand dismissively. “We can talk all you want, Cap, but I wouldn’t worry about Alex. Man’s terrified of commitment of any sort.”

“Still…”

Naomi came to the rescue. “Of course we can sit down and talk, honey. We’ll open up this bottle of sake and lay out some ground rules, or whatever you want.” She stole a sip of his coffee with a cheeky grin. “You are the expert, after all, having eight parents.”

Holden couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Yeah, but they aren’t all involved. Only four of them are in a polyamorous relationship.”

“Yeah,” Amos said, “I think that still makes you the expert.” Naomi giggled. Holden shook his head with mock exasperation.

Again, he found himself looking for a sign that something had changed. He couldn’t find one. Their banter was as it always was, and the little habits they had learned from each other were still there. Holden sensed that Amos was still anxious about the whole thing, but that wasn’t surprising. This whole thing had moved very fast, even if it had been simmering beneath the surface for the past year or two. He thought back to his worries from earlier, to Mother Elise’s advice. They had to find their language.

His gaze shifted over to Naomi. After everything that had happened, between Naomi giving the protomolecule sample to the Belt to her time on the Behemoth, maybe they had to patch up their own love language. She and Jim were not the same people they had been that first desperate time they had fucked in the airlock. They were changed, and he liked to think that it was a good thing, a good sort of change.

Amos interrupted his reverie. “What’d you get, then?” He opened the fridge and began to rummage through it, pulling out the various veggies and the block of tofu Holden had gotten for the curry. When he pulled out the bottle of wine, he whistled. “Who’re you trying to fuck?”

Holden tried snatched it from his hands, but Amos held it just out of reach. “No one. Can we save that?”

Amos rolled his eyes, but put it back in the fridge as Holden requested. He rummaged through the cabinets for a knife and cutting board.

“You wanna eat now?” Holden asked.

“Hell yeah, I’m starving. Naomi and I slept through lunch.” Amos paused, glancing from Holden to Naomi, and then made a low sound in the back of his throat. “Oh. Yeah.”

Holden wasn’t sure how to reply to that. He didn’t think there was really a good way to say “congrats on sleeping together for the first time” to two people who had so much history together. Amos looked a little confused, trying to decide if he had said something bad. Naomi glanced over at Jim and nodded at him.

Truly, it made him happy. They were the two people he loved best in the world, and he still couldn’t believe that they were trying this, that they were going to make this work. But, still, the anxieties slithered up from his belly, coiling around his lungs and squeezing his heart. He knew they loved him. He knew. But the tendril of roiling emotion slapped him with jealousy, the fear that they could both still leave, and the deep-seated, desperate urge for them to _tell_ him that they loved him back.

Holden felt himself spiraling. He knew he had to squash the thoughts down. Now wasn’t the time to lay his deep-seating insecurities at their feet, not when everything was so new, not when Amos was still skittish, not when he had just gotten Naomi back—

Amos managed to save the day with a crude joke, as he often did. “Don’t worry, Cap,” he said, pulling Holden against his side so that he could press an extremely sloppy kiss to his cheek, “I’ll still get it up for you later.”

Naomi rolled her eyes, and Holden couldn’t help but laugh. The anxiety settled back into his gut. Together, they began the simple, intimate task of cooking. Naomi’s fingers stroked up and down his back as he cut the vegetables, and Amos watched them closely, studying.

Holden hadn’t noticed it before, but the subtle intimacies that he and Naomi shared brought a strange light into Amos’ eyes. He mistook it for jealousy or apprehension at first, but he soon realized that Amos’ gaze burned with a fierce protectiveness, the same look that Holden had occasionally seen when they had been in a firefight or some other dangerous situation. He wanted desperately to ask Amos about it, to understand him in the same ways that Naomi did. _Later_ , the sensible side of his mind cautioned.

Later, he agreed.

They ate together, and Naomi complained about it not being spicy enough as per usual, and Amos fastidiously emptied his bowl, as he always did, and Holden wasn’t sure if the warmth in his chest was from the curry or the affection he had for the both of them. A little drunk on sake, they tossed the dishes into the recycler and climbed onto the couch. Naomi leaned against Holden. Amos laced his hands behind his head and sank down a little way away from the pair, but eventually his legs fell open so that his knee was brushing Holden’s.

“So,” Amos said after a moment. “You wanted to talk, Cap.”

“Mm. Yeah. We probably should.”

Both Naomi and Amos stared at him expectantly. He ran a hand through his hair nervously.

“Just, I don’t know, ground rules? To avoid hurt feelings?”

Amos’ face became slack and expressionless. Holden winced. He was dragging the mechanic into uncharted waters, and he felt responsible for whatever discomfort he was feeling.

“You sound like you already had some in mind,” said Naomi.

“Sort of. Not really. I just—" He paused, trying to think of how to express his thoughts. “Communication. We need to be honest with each other about how we’re feeling. I guess that’s all I wanted to say.” He was aware of the irony of this statement, given that he was currently bottling up feelings that he really should be sharing with them.

He was going to continue, but Amos interrupted him. “A’ight. Then let me say something.” His voice had taken on the rough tone from this morning. His eyes stared at some distant, invisible point.

“I’m not going to be able to give you what you two already give each other—” Amos began.

“—that’s not the point—” Holden interrupted.

“Stop. Shut up. Listen. I’m not going to be able to play the part. I’m telling you that now. I’m fine with that. You two gotta be fine with that too.” His gaze flicked over to regard them. “I’m saying this now because you two are going to get all weird about spending more time with each other than me, and I don’t want that.” Holden and Naomi cast each other a look. “I like spending time with both of you. I like fucking you. I can sit there and listen if you want to vent, I can make sure you two aren’t being idiots, and I can punch whoever needs punching. But I can’t play the part of the boyfriend, or whatever. I’m just a mechanic.” Amos’ eyes slid down to the floor. “I told you I would try. I want to try. I want to try being good to you both. Treating you good. But this thing the two of you have now? I’m not that guy. I don’t really want to be that guy. At least, I don’t think I do.”

Holden blinked, processing the words. They didn’t surprise him, and they didn’t seem to surprise Naomi either. It was surprisingly communicative for Amos, more than he had expected to hear. It held a depth of emotion that he was still unused to hearing from the mechanic. Holden found himself repeating the words he had just said this morning.

“You don’t need to be anything other than what you already are, Amos.”

The other man met his gaze, his blue eyes devoid of emotion or intent. Naomi reached out to place her hand on his bicep. “You do need to talk to us, though. Tell us how you’re feeling.” Amos breathed in deep, let it out slow. Naomi’s touch seemed to drain some of the tension from his body.

“Sure. Yeah.”

Naomi cast him a pointed look. Amos avoided her gaze, but eventually he nodded. It seemed to be a satisfactory answer for her. Holden wished, not for the first time, that he could decipher their language. He wanted to feel whatever they felt in their gentle touches, their guarded looks.

“Honesty,” Holden repeated. “That’s the rule.” Naomi hummed her agreement. Amos sat in stony silence but nodded.

A few beats passed. Naomi made a thoughtful noise and then shimmied up against Holden’s side, pressing her warm body tightly against his.

“I think,” she began. Her voice had dropped an octave, and she was looking between them with a sly smile. “That we should go to bed. If we’re being honest about how we’re feeling and all that.”

Amos’ looked at her, then shifted his gaze over to Holden. He shifted on the couch so that he sat closer to him and then placed a hand on his thigh. His free hand reached up so that he could run it up Holden’s neck, along the sharp line of his jaw. The motion was somewhere between a gentle caress and a threat of violence. A shudder ran through Holden. The air in the room had flipped from being laden with emotion to electric with desire. His own heart began to speed up as Amos gently brushed his lip with his thumb.

“Yeah,” Holden breathed, “Okay.”

Amos and Naomi grinned in unison. Then her lips were on his neck, and Amos’ breath was hot against the shell of his ear, and the mechanic’s chest rumbled with a quiet laugh. Four hands grasped at him, kneaded at his arms and thighs. They prompted him to stand, guided him to the bed. He let them push him down. He welcomed the dizzying feeling of succumbing to their greater gravity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find me on tumblr at pig-wings.tumblr.com!


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They surrounded him, smothered him.

They surrounded him, smothered him. Amos had pulled Holden onto his lap and Naomi knelt before them on the bed, grabbing his chin with her slender fingers so that she could kiss him deeply. She drank from his lips like wine, each press and pull and lick and nibble long and luxurious. Her tongue tasted like sake. Amos ground his crotch against Holden’s tailbone as if urging them on, hands pawing at his hips, thighs, shoulders. Naomi reached down to rub his hardening length just as Amos’ hands slipped up his shirt to tease his nipples. Gasping, he pulled away from her, leaning back against Amos’ broad chest. It took Holden a moment to get his bearings. He glanced back and forth between them, slightly bewildered by their fervent attention.

“Relax,” Naomi said. She drew the last syllable out, the sound sibilant and hissing; then, Amos’ hands tugged at the hem of Holden’s shirt and pulled it up over his head. The mechanic’s mouth latched onto the bare skin between his shoulder and neck, sucking gently before biting the bunched muscle there. Holden gasped again, Amos laughed under his breath, and Naomi pulled the pair toward her. She captured Holden’s mouth in another kiss, but her free hand snaked up to tangle in Amos’ hair, tugging gently as the man bit and sucked on the pale expanse of Holden’s shoulders and back. He couldn’t help but reach back to try and embrace Amos, his hand scrabbling against his back, his nails scraping against muscle. He needed to touch the other man, but he couldn’t say why. Amos just pressed his toothy grin against Holden’s shoulder blade and snaked a hand up to wrap gently around Holden’s throat; not squeezing, but the ghost of the threat was tantalizing.

When Naomi finally broke their kiss, Amos was quick to take his turn. He used his hand on Holden’s neck to tilt the other man toward him, and the feeling of the other man’s beard scraping roughly against his cheeks made Holden shiver. He felt Naomi leave the bed, but he was too distracted by Amos’ lips to see what she was up to. He pulled away when the mechanic did, and together they watched her pull her clothes off.

\---

Naomi began to undress, pulling her shirt and bra up and over her head. The men had stopped kissing so that they could watch her, their eyes hooded with lust, Amos’ hand kneading Holden’s erection in the same way he had teased her breasts earlier that day. She gave them a wry smile and wriggled her hips as she stepped out of her pants and underwear. Amos grinned at her wolfishly, and Holden had the same look of blissful appreciation that he always got when he watched her strip. She swayed over to them and undid the button of Holden’s pants, sliding them off his legs with the help of Amos’ maneuvering. Holden’s cock sprang free, hard and pink with his arousal.

Amos pushed the captain away so that he could strip as well. Holden took the opportunity to scoop Naomi into his lap, running his fingers through her hair as he pulled her in for a kiss. She writhed on him, rubbing her pussy along his length, and Holden moaned appreciatively. She heard Amos’ breath hitch; saw glanced over and saw him watching them with rapt attention, one hand wrapped around his cock and pumping slowly. She held his gaze as she rocked against Holden. Amos’ throat bobbed as he swallowed, then he inclined his head slightly, casting a meaningful glance toward Jim. Right. They had an agenda tonight, and even though she was embarrassed to make such a request of her lover, she couldn’t deny the thrill of excitement that filled her gut when she remembered what she and Amos had discussed earlier.

She turned her attention back to Jim, whose eyes had fluttered shut in his pleasure. Naomi took a moment to study his face, the way the tension lines around his eyes and mouth had vanished under her ministrations, the way his lips were slightly swollen from kissing. Always the most handsome when he wasn’t trying to be, she thought. Gently, she took his chin between her fingers and forced him to look at her, pressing a chaste kiss to his lips as his eyes blinked open.

Naomi took a deep breath, steeling herself. Her stomach fluttered with excitement. “I want to watch Amos fuck you,” she whispered against Jim’s mouth. His entire body tensed beneath hers, a shudder rippling down his spine. The hand he had in her hair twitched.

She saw him swallow before saying, simply, “Yeah?”

She hummed an affirmative, slowing her grinding to tease him. His positive reaction encouraged her to continue, “Do you want that?” Her lips traveled up to nibble at his earlobe.

Holden paused, sucking in a breath as her nails raked down the soft skin of his back, then admitted, “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

Naomi grinned and giggled, pulling him down on top of her. He kissed her earnestly, one hand trailing down to massage her breasts, rubbing tight circles around her nipples until she squirmed under his attentions. The bed creaked as Amos shifted closer to them, and when Holden moved down to suck one of her nipples into his mouth, the mechanic took the opportunity to kiss her himself. She wrapped a hand around his cock and stroked him slowly, rubbing her thumb against his weeping slit.

Amos moaned appreciatively, rutting into her palm before pulling himself out of her grasp. “You said that we had to make you come first,” he reminded her. Holden glanced up as he sucked a bruise into the skin of her breast, waggling his eyebrows at Amos’ words. Naomi giggled and regarded him for a minute, considering. Jim stared back with an almost pleading expression; his tongue darted out to wet his lips. Her hand snaked down to push against the crown of his head, and Holden got the message immediately; he crawled further down the bed, pressing wet, sucking kisses to her stomach, her thighs, until he slotted himself between her legs and pressed his hot tongue against her slit. She gasped at those first few moments of overwhelming stimulation, and Jim gazed up at her with those warm brown eyes of his until she let herself surrender to the feeling, her head falling back against the bed. Amos sidled up next to her, pressing himself along the curve of her body. He picked up where Holden had left off, pinching a nipple and swiping his tongue along her pulse point.

“You sure you don’t want me to fuck you instead?” Amos breathed against her ear. She could feel him smiling, though she saw his eyes trailing down to leer at Holden. Jim apparently took his words as a challenge. He wrapped his lips around her clit and sucked, sliding a finger into her when she gasped in pleasure. Amos chuckled darkly, lowly. The sound made her pussy clench around Jim’s finger.

“Nah,” Amos continued. His words came slowly, lazily. “I know you want me to fuck Jim. ’Cause apparently you’ve been thinking about it, dirty girl,” he teased, rocking himself against her hips in emphasis. Naomi squirmed in embarrassment at Amos’ filthy words, though she couldn’t deny the thrill it sent through her. His lack of filter was dangerous in many situations, but she found that she liked his dirty talk. Jim did too, apparently; his gaze had snapped up to look at Amos, eyes wide with what Naomi hoped was the good sort of surprise. His cheeks were flushed, and she thought that it was from more than just the work of eating her out. Amos saw, and he smiled wolfishly down at the man. He brushed his calloused thumbs along her nipples as Jim dragged his tongue through her folds, his brown eyes fixed on hers, his arousal bleeding into his irises.

“She had it all planned out,” Amos drawled. He was grinding against her now, smearing hot precum on her skin.

“Not all planned out,” she protested softly.

“You should tell him, then.”

She knew exactly what sort of game Amos was playing. The big man looked endlessly amused, his face cracking into a grin, his eyes bright with arousal and a sort of sinister good humor. When she hesitated, Jim pulled away from her and pressed a kiss to her inner thigh. “Tell me,” he said against her skin, his voice rough with arousal. Letting her know that she didn’t have to be embarrassed.

“I—I want to see you and Amos together. I want to watch him press you into the bed and—” Here she paused, unsure if she would be crossing a line.

Amos traced circles around her nipples, an oddly reassuring gesture. “And?” he prompted. She reached over to pinch his thigh, then she wrapped her hand around his cock and squeezed beneath the head.

“And…I want to watch him fuck you as hard as he fucked me today.”

“Atta girl,” Amos said at the same time Holden whispered a low and desperate “ _Fuck_.”

“Make her come, Jim.” Amos’ voice was gruff, but Naomi thought it sounded more like a plea than an order for their lover. Jim didn’t protest either way—with a moan, he lapped at her clit with a renewed vigor. “I like listening to you talk dirty,” Amos said, his tone lightly teasing. He silenced the comeback that was perched on her tongue with a smothering kiss. 

She couldn’t resist the two of them; Amos’ tongue plundered her mouth, while Jim drew circles around her clit. When her legs began to shake, Amos switched to sucking her neck, pausing now and then to whisper absolute filth into her skin. Jim moaned with each dirty phrase, his lips buzzing against her sex, and the pleasure mounted in her belly, the heat crawling down her thighs and up her chest until it peaked and the tense thread holding her together snapped. Naomi came with a loud moan, one hand reaching down to press Holden’s face against her pussy, the other holding Amos’ teeth to her neck. The two men gently guided her down from her peak, Amos with his tongue, Holden with the two fingers he had plunged into her clenching sex.

“Fuck,” Naomi breathed as the boys disentangled themselves from her limbs. Jim rose to kiss her, but Amos intercepted so that he could lick the taste of her wetness from Holden’s lips. She liked watching them kiss. Amos was possessive; he had wrapped one of his hands around the back of Holden’s neck, holding the other man close to him. Jim just melted against the big mechanic, surrendering to the push and pull of his eager hands. The two beautiful men made an even more beautiful picture. In many respects, they went together like oil and water, but the contrast worked, even here.

Naomi reached over to the bedside table to grab the bottle of lube. As they kissed, she slicked up one digit, then positioned herself alongside Jim so that she could rub her finger against his rim. Holden pulled away from Amos with a quiet gasp, and Naomi pressed the finger inside. He moaned, shivering. Amos pulled them back together, their lips crashing together in a messy, aggressive kiss. He reached down and began to pump Holden’s cock in time with Naomi’s slow thrusting.

\---

They were going to kill him. Amos’ hand was wrapped tightly around his cock, and Naomi now had two of her fingers thrusting in and out of his hole. She had sat up so that she could nibble the sensitive skin of his neck. Amos would pause his conquest of Holden’s mouth to occasionally press his lips to Naomi’s. Based on the way her fingers would stutter, he kissed her with the same ferocity that he kissed Holden with.

“Switch,” Amos said. He nipped Jim’s bottom lip playfully as he and Naomi swapped places. Now she was facing his front, and he heard the soft click of a cap as Amos lubed up his own fingers. He pressed two in, and Holden grunted from the feeling of fullness. He certainly had thicker fingers than Naomi. Amos wasted no time, scissoring his digits.

Naomi didn’t waste any time either. She crawled down, cat-like, until she could take his cock into her warm mouth. He moaned loud enough to embarrass himself as her lips closed over him. Amos laughed his infuriating laugh, and Naomi hummed an affirmation around his cock, and he felt himself slipping away into the fuzzy void of pleasure, the place where he could pause his racing thoughts, if only for a little bit. Naomi flicked beneath his cockhead with her tongue, and he couldn’t help but thrust forward into her mouth a little. Amos noticed.

“Wonder who the better cocksucker is,” Amos taunted in his ear. Holden still wasn’t used to the mechanic’s constant litany of dirty talk, despite having heard that velvet-dark, velvet-soft tone many times during their trip from Luna to Titan. He knew Amos liked riling him up, knew he liked it even better when he talked dirty back.

“You don’t know yet?” Holden gasped out.

“Nope. Not yet.” Amos emphasized this with a particularly pointed thrust of his fingers. Naomi hollowed her cheeks as he bucked forward again.

“Though,” Amos continued, “I do like the way your throat gets all loose, the way you let me fuck your face—”

Naomi moaned around his cock. Holden felt himself coming undone. “I’m—”

“Don’t come yet,” Amos said, pulling Holden’s body away from Naomi. He groaned at the loss of sensation, but then one of Amos’ big hands reached down to languidly stroke his cock. The big man leered at Naomi, his face cracking into a toothy smile. “Naomi hasn’t gotten her show yet.”

Naomi giggled, swiping her pink tongue across her lips, and then made herself comfortable against the headboard. Amos positioned he and Holden so that they were both facing her and admired her spread legs as he slicked his cock up. “How do you want this to go, Boss?”

She just shrugged, giggling again. “Oh, however you want. Just make our boy feel good, Amos.”

Amos laughed. Holden moaned at Naomi’s words. He _was_ theirs; they had owned his heart for so long, and now they both owned his body. He felt caught between them, a pendulum, and though it was overwhelming, decadently overwhelming, there was no place that he would rather be. His worries from earlier were gone, gone, gone. He was a being of pure sensation, pure, unfiltered _want_.

The blunt head of Amos’ cock pressed against his hole as Naomi reached over for the vibrator in their bedside table. The mechanic pushed Holden down so that he was on his hands and knees, and then thrust inside so hard that Holden swore.

He wasted no time in setting a punishing pace; Amos seemed intent on giving Naomi a proper show. Holden was a little embarrassed that she was watching him get used in this way but based on her moans it seemed to be what she wanted to see. The vibrator buzzed between her legs and he desperately wished he could reach her so that he could spear her on his tongue while Amos fucked him. The mechanic’s hands pressed bruises into his hips. When Holden peeked back to look at Amos’ face, he saw that he was staring intently at Naomi, who was fucking herself on the vibrator. Then Amos saw him looking, and he pushed Holden’s face down into the bed. Jim made a noise halfway between a growl and a moan.

“Harder, Amos,” Naomi moaned. He and Holden swore in unison.

Amos pressed Holden flat down against the bed and draped his whole weight against Holden’s back. His cock felt bigger this way, and Holden groaned at the fullness. His thrusts came slower, but they were long and complete and hard, each impact making Holden hiss from the sting of Amos’ hipbones against his own.

“You like watching your boyfriend get fucked?” Amos’ breath was ragged from the exertion, his voice tinged with a dark ferocity. Naomi made a soft sound of affirmation. Holden desperately wished he could see the look on her face, but his cheek was pressed down against the mattress and all he could see was Amos’ bicep. “Bet you do,” Amos purred. He paused, groaning, to grind deeply into Holden.

Amos kept talking, but Holden just thought about Naomi and her vibrator, letting the fantasy—so close, but out of his reach—guide his pleasure. He knew her lips would be parted, her eyes shut. He loved seeing her like that, so undone, so vulnerable, so _herself_. He fantasized about the wet slide of the vibrator in and out of her pussy. He wished he could fuck her. He knew he wouldn’t last long enough to, though; Amos was grinding against his prostate, and his cock slid against the sheets with every thrust. The friction was nearly unbearable, but he knew he had to hold out until Amos was close to finishing.

As it turned out, he didn’t have to last long. Another minute and Amos began to grunt under his breath, his rhythm growing unsteady. “Fuck, Jim,” he breathed against the crown of Holden’s head. It was quiet, just for the two of them. Holden screwed his eyes shut.

“Come in him, Amos,” Naomi said. Fuck, she was so hot. Holden bit into his own arm as Amos, growling, plowed him into the bed. He was surprised when the mechanic pulled them back up, manhandling Holden back onto his hands and knees.

“Look at her,” Amos said. His voice was a snarl, feral and animal. With one hand he yanked Holden’s head up by the root of his hair so that he was looking at Naomi. He wrapped his other hand around Jim’s cock and let his own thrusts guide the motion.

Naomi blinked her eyes open so that she could watch him. That alone was enough to push Holden over the edge. He came with a shout, spilling into Amos’ palm. As his ears rang, he heard Naomi moan loud and long as she orgasmed again. Amos sealed himself against Holden, swearing up a storm as he too came. The mechanic rocked himself languidly against Holden as he savored his aftershocks, then draped himself against Holden’s back, smearing his cheek against the sweat drying there.

Naomi’s chest heaved as she regarded them. They all marinated in the silence for a moment, coming down from the high of orgasm. Then she cracked a smile, tossed the vibrator onto the bedside table, and scooted down so that she could gently kiss Jim.

“You two look good together,” she said. Holden couldn’t help but smile. He felt wrung out in the best way possible.

Amos pulled out with a shiver and left the bed, presumably to wash his hands. Holden wrapped himself around Naomi and pressed soft kisses to her cheeks, breasts, lips.

“Was that what you wanted?” he asked.

“It was more than I wanted. So good, baby.”

He smiled. Amos came back and managed to maneuver the pair so that he had an arm wrapped around both of them. Naomi kissed his knuckle.

“I could get used to this,” said Amos. He ghosted a finger along Holden’s soft cock, letting it travel up between Naomi’s breasts.

“Yeah,” Holden said as Naomi hummed a note of affirmation. He wasn’t sure what else to say; he didn’t have any poetry for the moment. Sleep was tugging at his conscious, and he felt so warm in their arms. So safe and wanted. Naomi slipped away first, her body becoming slack against his, twitching occasionally as she began to dream. Holden wasn’t far behind. He felt Amos press a hand first against Naomi’s shoulder and then his, and then the big man left the bed. He wasn’t surprised when he heard the couch springs squeak gently. He reached up to cup the spot Amos had touched, and then he too drifted off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! This chapter just didn't want to cooperate for whatever reason. How are we enjoying season 5 so far? 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at pig-wings.tumblr.com for Amos appreciation, season 5 hype, and cool bird facts. Happy holidays, and may you be safe and healthy.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was good, at least for a little while. 

It was good, at least for a little while. 

They had no rush to be anywhere, so it didn’t matter that time was becoming slushy and nonlinear. Two weeks passed before Holden was aware that time _was_ passing. Alex had gotten a transport back to Tycho and had assured them that he was more than happy to drink beer and watch his noir movies in the suites they owned there, grumbling something about Titan and swimsuits and colts and fillies and how he didn’t want any piece of that, no thank you.

He, Amos, and Naomi were left alone.

They had a lot of sex, and they ate a lot of food, and they drank a lot of alcohol. They passed the cat’s cradle of this new relationship back and forth, adding, subtracting, gently holding and supporting the others’ contributions. It was delicate, but it was growing sturdier with every minute. He was feeling good, confident. He thought that this could be a real thing, a permanent thing, and it made his chest feel warm. He was happy. Naomi was happy. Amos was as happy as he ever was. Awkward, maybe, but happy.

Which is why it was so painful when everything went to shit.

In retrospect, he should have known it was coming. Holden had yet to bring up his anxieties to Amos and Naomi, despite his speech about communication; there had never been a chance, or at least that was the lie he kept telling himself. Naomi and Amos would have made the time, even if all the time really was gone. They would chisel minutes out of subspace for him. The anxieties were still there, of course. He knew he couldn’t unroot them by himself. He made excuses, telling himself that they needed to make Amos comfortable first. It was easier to push away his own fears of rejection and abandonment that way. It was easier to ignore that fact that he needed them like water and air even though there was a very persistent voice in his mind that kept saying that they would both be fine without him. He didn’t believe that voice, not really. But, it was there.

He and Amos were sitting in the living area of his and Naomi’s suite, drinking the Belt’s best imitation of sambuca and shooting the shit. Holden kept telling himself that it wouldn’t have bothered him so much if he hadn’t been a bit drunk. He didn’t believe it, if he was being honest, but it made him feel less guilty about the whole thing.

Naomi had left earlier to go enjoy some time to herself. She had been telling them stories about the _Behemoth_ before she had left. Maybe that was what put him on edge, that reminder that she had left, that reminder of the odd hollow feeling that had made a nest in his sternum. He was still picking through those months. It felt like he had lost time without her there, or like time had suddenly started ticking both faster and slower simultaneously the moment she stepped onto the Behemoth. _It’s not her fault_ , he berated himself. He hated that little voice in the back of his mind that tried to blame everyone but himself. This was on him.

“Can I ask you about something?” said Amos. The man had been a little quiet all evening, futzing with the label on the bottle. They were sitting side by side on the couch, their legs stretched out onto the coffee table in front of them, their knees touching. Over the past few weeks, Holden had learned that Amos liked to be touched, but that it made him nervous too. He tried hard to respect his boundaries. Amos seemed to like the casual contact, the sort of thing he could easily pull away from.

“Sure,” Holden said. “Of course.”

“Yeah, so. You know the first time Naomi and I fucked by ourselves?”

“Sure.”

Amos paused to pick at his beard before he continued, “She told me she loved me, and I didn’t say it back. And it seems like the kind of thing people say back to each other. Not sure if I fucked that one up. It’s been bugging me, y’know?”

Jealously wound its tight coils around his heart and squeezed. He hadn’t realized that Naomi had said that to Amos. Not that there was anything wrong with it, of course, or like it was that surprising. But, still, it felt like someone had punched him in the gut. He had to swallow before he replied, carefully script whatever he was about to say next so that he didn’t just blurt out _but you love me too, right_?! Amos managed to beat him to it, though.

“But,” the big man continued, “I noticed that she doesn’t really say it back when you say it. So, I dunno. Maybe I didn’t fuck up that bad.”

Fuck. He knew Amos didn’t mean anything by it, that it was just an observation to Amos, like the fact that the sky was blue or that an air scrubber was shot. But goddamn, he wanted to slug the man. It felt like a dig, like Amos was purposefully trying to get a rise from him. It would have been a dig from anyone but Amos, but he couldn’t blame the man. He kept telling himself that, like a mantra in his head.

How had Amos managed to step right on his deepest insecurities and kick them down like tower of blocks? And why was it so easy for Naomi to tell Amos that she loved him? She so rarely told Holden that. He knew why, even if he knew that he could never quite understand the depths of her trauma. He knew why, and he respected it, and yet…why did it still sting? He knew that she loved him. He _knew_. But there was still that doubt, that fear that sprang from her leaving. His mind was starting to fold in on itself, the voices overlapping. _You asshole_ , a part of him thought. _You can’t be mad at them for this._ But every emotion and thought he had bottled up was breaking through now and shouting _they don’t love you, they don’t love you, they don’t love you_!

Amos said his name. Then he said his name again. The man was staring at him, his eyebrows furrowed. “You okay?” Amos asked, and the words all sounded buzzy and slow to Holden. The room felt very small suddenly. His head swam. He couldn’t look at Amos. He didn’t want to look at Amos. It felt like his thoughts were jammed up, slamming into each other and stopping like PDC rounds when one of the cannons got stuck. He couldn’t think. He was unable to think.

“Jim?” Amos offered again. The man looked as if he was debating whether he should touch Holden or not.

“I need to go,” Holden blurted out. Amos looked confused, but he didn’t do anything to stop Holden when he stood from the couch, slid his shoes on, and stepped out of the hotel room. That stung too, but what had he expected? _You fucking asshole_ , he thought to himself.

He walked. The panic and grief and guilt filled his throat until breathing felt hard. He passed restaurants, bars, and clubs. High, high above him, Titan’s lightning tore through the sky with white teeth. A hummingbird zipped by, chased by one of the little pollinator drones.

His hand terminal buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out, hoping that it was Amos or Naomi. A news alert filled his screen. Some famous physicist or author or politician had died. He stared at the notification, not comprehending, and then slid the terminal back into his pocket. He walked and let guilt and grief weigh down his steps. His thoughts were slowly starting to come back now, filtering through his hazy mind one by one. First, he thought about how he should have just said something to them sooner and saved them all a lot of grief. Second, he thought about what to say to Naomi when Amos inevitably let her know what happened. Third, he thought about what a fucking asshole he was. Not a single one of the thoughts were productive.

He walked. 

\---

Amos was alone on the couch when Naomi stepped back into the suite. His brow was furrowed, and he was staring resolutely at the half-empty bottle of sambuca they had been drinking earlier as if it had just offered him a grievous insult.

“Hey,” she said, toeing her shoes off and sliding onto the couch next to him. She had been expecting to come home to him and Holden pleasantly tipsy, watching the entertainment feeds on the couch or maybe fooling around and kissing each other. She listened for the sound of Jim using the bathroom or doing something in their bedroom, but the apartment was eerily silent. It struck her that his shoes hadn’t been by the door when she had stepped in.

“Where’s Jim?” she asked.

Amos turned to face her, and she watched his face tighten as he processed the question. He looked very, very confused and a touch concerned.

“I think I fucked up.” There was a touch of panic to his voice that she didn’t think she had ever heard before.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Talk to me about that.”

Amos turned back to stare at the bottle. He picked it up and ran his thumb along the rim. “I asked Holden about something and I think it was the wrong thing to ask.” Now his gaze slid back to her. “You know when we first fucked? How you said that you loved me?”

“Sure.” She remembered it vividly. She had not anticipated telling Amos that; she knew that it wasn’t something that he needed to hear. But, they had known each other for so long, carried each other through so much shit. After her experience on the _Behemoth_ , her breath tying knots in her lungs as the _Roci_ careened toward the ring gate, she felt like she would regret it if she didn’t say it. She had then, at least. She had regretted not telling all of them how much they all meant to her.

“I asked him if I should have said it back to you. ‘Cause I didn’t know if I should or not then, and I still don’t really know now. And he got all weird and walked off. It was like…” Amos laughed suddenly, the sound grating and sudden. It made her jump a little. “Well, shit, it was like the first time Jim and I got together. You or Alex sent some pictures and he got all panicky and starting freaking out about killing us all. It was just like that. He got all fidgety and quiet and weird and he walked off. Didn’t say nothin’. Just sort of…shut down. I dunno.”

She knew what had happened. She knew exactly what Holden had been thinking, why he had walked away, why he had shut down. She felt her gut clench with a bad cocktail of feelings—something like guilt and anger and doubt and blame all shaken together until they were frothing. Naomi sighed and tugged at a lock of her hair, thinking. Okay. Action plan. She laid out the schmeatics of everything that had gone wrong in her mind and began to identify the spots where the sealant was leaking, where the bolts were starting to come loose.

“I fucked up, didn’t I?” Amos asked when she didn’t reply. The question was so earnest that it made her heart hurt. There was a shadow of sadness to his voice.

“No,” Naomi said. “No.” And then, because it made her feel better to say it aloud, “You didn’t fuck up. No one did. I think I know what happened.” Amos nodded sagely, taking her word as gospel.

She stood, grabbed her belongings, and slid her shoes back on. She thought she had a good idea of where she might find Holden, if part behavior was any indication. Amos was watching her with the same focus that he always did. Trusting her to make the call. She put her hand on the doorknob to find their lover, then turned back to face him.

“To answer your question,” she said, “You didn’t need to say it back then. You still don’t need to say it back now.” She paused.

“That being said, Jim might like to hear you say it. Only if you mean it, though.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a short chapter, but it kept telling me that it was as long as it needed to be. Happy new year everyone! You can find me on tumblr at pig-wings.tumblr.com.


	11. Interlude III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naomi, Holden, and Amos reflect on love and loneliness.

Naomi left the room, breathed in deep. An unbidden feeling of panic was beginning to flood her chest, snaking around her lungs, squeezing. She let it fill her, because she knew that it was the only way she’d be able to vent it. Can’t funnel air back into a pipe once it’s escaped. She breathed in again, slower than before.

**\---**

Suddenly she is back outside of the ring gate, standing on the deck of the Behemoth, staring at a Camina Drummer that she barely recognizes. Hands around her, tight and oppressive, pulling her back like thrust gravity. She kicks and writhes against them. The Jim on the screen is not Jim. She knows it on an instinctual level. The movement of his lips are not right, his posture is odd and tense, and the cadence is all wrong. She cannot say why any of it isn’t right, but the parts of her brain that have been carefully honed by centuries of evolution to separate _friend_ and _mate_ from _foe_ is dead certain that it is not Jim.

Camina won’t listen. She never listens, Naomi realizes. Something to swallow down for now. Something to dwell on later, when Jim and Amos and Alex are dead or alive or stuck in some weird in between that humanity cannot access. She thinks of that Belter slingshot pilot. One moment he was human. The next he was viscera. Rewind the tape, play it again.

Almost everyone she loves is on that little ship, careening toward an unknown fate. The missile is approaching. She almost wishes that the missile would hit—there would be certainty in that, at least. It would be quick. They wouldn’t feel anything. Wouldn’t know that they had died.

She thinks of them all, and she lets the grief rise up, fill her, overwhelm her. She misses them terribly. She misses Alex’s offkey singing to all those obnoxious Martian country songs. She misses Amos’ terrible stench after a long day in a vac suit. She misses the white line of drool that’s always crusted to Jim’s mouth in the morning. She misses her little family, odd as it may be. She feels their absence like a wound.

Maybe this is what she needed. Maybe this is what she stood to gain by coming here. Maybe the universe needed to rip one more thing—one more family—away from her. She wishes she had been more honest with them. She wishes that she had told Alex that he always made her tea just the right way. Wishes she had told Amos how he reminds her every single day that being good is a choice you have to make. Wishes she had told Jim how much she loves him, and how she is simultaneously terrified of losing him and terrified of being lost in him.

 _I want to go home_. She chants it in her head as if she can make it so just with her mind. She wants to be there with them. She wants to kiss Jim. She wants to pluck the _Rocinante_ from the void like a toy and put her down somewhere safe. Somewhere where she can grab Jim, kiss him, and then never let him go.

Naomi doesn’t regret her time on the _Behemoth_. She doesn’t regret coming here, helping build something that the Belt can finally own, clobbered together thought it may be. She doesn’t regret her relationship with Camina. She doesn’t regret telling Jim that she had to leave.

She does, however, regret not telling him that she loved him. She tried to show him in a million ways, but there’s something to be said for words. The words just always came a little harder for her though. Once bitten, twice shy and all that.

She wants to tell Holden how much she loves him, and yet she is terrified to do so. How can both of those thoughts be true at once? How they can they exist together and not destroy one another, eat each other?

The _Roci_ is burning hard, falling toward the oceanic blue nothing of the ring gate. The burn alone might be enough to kill them all. Not a good way to go out. She squeezes her eyes shut, focuses on what is happening around her. The hands on her arms are still tight, pinching at the skin hard enough to bruise. The bridge is buzzing with shouts and klaxons.

Then, the _Roci_ is gone, blinked out of existence. Just gone, like it had never been there. She prods at herself. She would know if Jim was dead. She would feel it, somehow. She has never been a spiritual person, but she finds it hard to believe that she wouldn’t somehow know.

She takes stock. She feels nothing. Far away, Drummer is shouting.

* * *

There had been very few times in his life where Holden had felt alone. Surrounded constantly by the overbearing affection of eight parents, he had never been never short of someone to play with, someone to confide to, someone to cry against, someone to love. When he joined the navy, he knew that he had buddies and flings and superiors to rely on, a whole network of companions. The military life wasn’t for him, but he never felt alone. Not once.

The weeks after his dishonorable discharge, though, had been different.

\---

“We’re proud of you, honey,” Mother Elise says in the message. It’s just her now, the rest of his parents having scattered. Her face is large and slightly disproportionate on the screen. “I know it’s not easy. But you did the right thing.”

Holden sighs reflexively. He’s grateful for the light delay—he doesn’t think he would have been able to handle hearing that in person. The words make him irrationally angry. He squeezes his eyes shut, clenches his teeth, and puts a reminder in his calendar to reply to the message later. His mom doesn’t deserve his sulking.

It has been a week since he left the U.N. ship. A week alone, nursing his broken hand. A week of cheap takeout and bad mushroom beer and sleeping and waking alone.

He takes stock of the tiny hole he had rented. He can hear his neighbors arguing through the wall, thinks he can hear people having sex above him. The only sound in his apartment is the gentle ticking of the air recyclers and the occasional whine of the cheap minifridge. Holden tries to figure out what emotion he’s feeling, but he can’t find a name for it. Loneliness, but deeper. He thinks back to the farm. The coyotes would sing at night, calling and responding with reedy wails until they found each other somewhere in the dark of the ravine.

His neighbors’ door slams. He winces at the noise. The room suddenly feels very, very small.

Holden stands, grabs his jacket, and walks out of his hole. Ceres is bustling, just as it always is. A delivery drone whizzes by above him and vanishes into the network on tunnels built into the ceiling. A busker sings with a throaty, deep baritone, plucking at an instrument that sounds like a guitar but doesn’t look like one. He walks into a bar called The Automatic. It’s a seedy joint, darkly lit, but the beer is cheap and it’s usually empty this time of the day. The bartender is watching a professional handball match on the bar’s big screen, scowling and smiling in turn as the players move across the court. He turns when Holden walks in.

“Hey, coyo,” the bartender says. “How’s the hand?”

Holden glances down at his splinted fingers as he takes a seat. “Better, I guess.”

He orders a beer and a plate of white kibble. Comfort food. He plays with the condensation on the glass for a moment, gets bored, and then turns in his seat so that he can watch the handball match.

“You play?” the bartender asks, gesturing toward the screen.

“Oh—no. Never have.”

“Earther, yeah?”

Holden smiles faintly at that. “Yup. North America.”

The bartender grins and clicks his tongue. “No handball for you. So, what then?”

“Well, I watched a lot of baseball back home.” Home. The thought stings him. Earth doesn’t feel much like home, anymore, but neither does anywhere else.

The bartender laughs, the sound coming from deep in his belly. “No shit. Baseball not a Belter sport, yeah? Not a fan of sports where you can break a window easy, us.”

Holden laughs at that too. It feels good, cathartic. He tries to think of the last time he laughed like this. The bartender shakes his head in amusement, refills his pint glass, and then goes back to the kitchen to get his order. A woman walks in while he’s in the back. She shouts to the bartender in a thick Belter patois, and he yells back. The bartender delivers Holdens food and then walks away to talk to her; they’re talking so fast that Holden can’t figure out what they’re saying. He pulls out his hand terminal and scrolls through the news feeds as he eats his meal. All the while, he tries to pick up bits and pieces of their conversation, of the conversations of the few other patrons in the bar. But he can’t hear anything, and it just leaves him feeling very tired.

When he’s done, he gets up, pays, and thanks the bartender, who flashes him a hand gesture that Holden doesn’t know the meaning of, but at least knows it friendly. He walks back into the bright lights of Ceres. His feet move automatically and as he walks, his mind empties. Not a good empty, he realizes. Not the fluffy empty of getting too high or the dopamine empty after orgasm. Just empty. Something is threatening to crawl out of his brain, but he ignores it.

His feet bring him to the arboretum a few blocks away. It’s not a particularly nice one—there are many scattered across the station that are better maintained—but something about being surrounded by wilting greenery is deeply comforting to Holden. He sits beneath a pine hybrid specifically adapted for low gravity. There’s a little placard next to it that lauds its incredible adaptations. He knows it by heart now— _the Galileo pine is a lab-grown hybrid engineered specifically for use in low-gravity environments_ …

He doesn’t notice it when he starts to cry. The emptiness yawns within him, and the bitter loneliness nestles in deeper. It makes a home in him, and he can’t find any reason not to let it do so.

* * *

Amos was alone in their room on Titan.

Jim had gone to be alone, and Naomi had left to go find him. Amos thought about her last words to him. Jim wanted to—needed to?—hear that Amos loved him. The thought sat poorly in Amos’ gut, heavy as a stone.

Love had always been a strange concept to Amos, something he was happy to observe from a distance without trying himself. Naomi and Jim loved each other, and he liked that. It made him happy to see them happy. Alex had once loved his ex-wife enough to start a family with her. His own mother had loved him, apparently, though he didn’t remember her. Back on their camping trip, he had told Holden that he, Alex, and Naomi all loved him when the cap had been having his panic attack. He had meant it, but he felt that saying “ _we_ love you” was very different than “ _I_ love you”, like a shield he could hide behind.

But now, Naomi said that she loved him. That was a weird feeling. He kept turning that idea around in his hands like it was a ball of clay, fussing with it, pulling it apart, poking and prodding at it. He wanted to understand it. He wanted to understand how she knew that she loved him, so that he could understand if he loved her and Jim in the same way that they loved him.

“It’s not a puzzle.” Lydia’s voice came suddenly, tinged with that patient exasperation he was so used to hearing. “It’s a _feeling_.”

“Yeah,” Amos said. “I don’t got a whole lot of those.”

“You know, you said the same thing the last time you and I saw each other. When you left me.”

“Hey—”

“Don’t interrupt. You said the same thing that last time we saw each other. You told me there wasn’t anyone in your heart. Did you mean it?”

“I don’t see how that’s the same.”

Lydia frowned. She was both real and not real. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but he knew she wouldn’t be there. She looked like she was about to say something else, her dark lips parting just a bit. Then, her face softened.

“You’ve been thinking about me a lot,” she said gently. If she was real, she would have reached out to cup his face. He could feel it.

“Huh. I guess I have.”

“Because you’ve been thinking about love,” she continued, “and whether you love these people. Whether you loved me.”

He shifted, uncomfortable. He didn’t know what to say to that.

“Love is complicated, until it’s not. You either love them or you don’t. You either loved me, or you didn’t. You don’t need to tie yourself in knots figuring it out, Timmy. It’s more about the gut than the heart, anyways.”

“Okay.” He scratched at his beard. She seemed to wait for him to reply, then sighed.

“You know, for a boy who likes to think he is very simple, you are really very complicated, Timmy.” She paused, a wry smile dancing on her lips. Again, he wanted to touch her. Again, he didn’t know what to say.

Lydia shook her head, unfolded her hands and spread them wide as if she was about to wrap them around him. “I love you. Be good.” And then she was gone. Just gone, like she had never been there.

He sat there staring at the empty air. The air recyclers ticked quietly. He glanced at the clock. A half-hour had passed since Naomi had left.

“Huh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find me on tumblr at pig-wings.tumblr.com.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We need to talk, don’t we?” asked Naomi. Again, Holden gave her a sad smile.

Naomi knew just where to find Jim.

Something she’d come to appreciate over the years was that Holden loved arboretums and greenhouses. Every time they docked at a station, he would find some excuse to wander through the green spaces. He didn’t mind if they were small or poorly tended, some labor of love maintained by a small club of people on Ceres or Tycho. He liked to sit among the green, just watching the plants sway in an artificial breeze, telling her the names of plants whenever she joined him. He always insisted that it wasn’t some Earth thing, but she knew it was. She couldn’t blame him. He had grown up surrounded by trees, and so it was understandable that he missed them. Jim seemed to think that still clinging to a few Earther traditions was wrong. It made her a little sad. Sometimes, he got himself so wrapped up in respecting Amos’ past and her own feelings about the inner planets that he forgot that he had been born there, that he had lived a whole life down there. Of course he would miss things about the little blue orb.

Titan was home to a lot of green space, and the apartments they had rented had a greenhouse just a minutes walk away. It was lush and well-tended, full of exotic orchids and emerald green ferns. Carefully bred butterflies drifted in the low gravity, flapping their jeweled wings only occasionally. Dragonflies hunted the pests that seemed to follow plants across the solar system. The greenhouse was its own little ecosystem, unique and ever-changing despite the fact that it was trying its hardest to mimic the biomes found on Earth. Plants from all corners of the globe mingled and laced roots and vines around each other like star-crossed lovers.

Humidity accosted her as she entered, somehow simultaneously oppressive with its sticky weight and a refreshing change from the dry station air. She wandered back to the North American section of the greenhouse. It was full of pines and dogwoods that rustled gently with an artificial breeze, and bright flaming patches of a plant that Jim had called Virginia creeper raced across the ground and up the trunks of the trees. Just as she expected, Holden was sitting on a bench underneath a pine, breaking apart one of the needles between his fingers. She could smell the minty sap from here.

“Hey,” she said, approaching him. Holden glanced up and smiled a little sadly.

“Hey.”

There was plenty of room on the bench for both of them. She sat next to him, giving him a bit of space, and gazed around the artificial ecosystem. Holden continued to break apart pine needles with his fingernails.

“We need to talk, don’t we?” asked Naomi. Again, Holden gave her a sad smile.

“You talked to Amos?”

“I did.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Jim.” She didn’t reach out to touch him, but she gave him a firm look. She saw him tense, smile, and then sigh. Holden spread his hands wide, unsure of what to say.

What _was_ there to say? Holden was hurt, and she was the cause of the hurt. At the same time, she couldn’t will her trauma and feelings away. She couldn’t swallow the years of anguish that had shaped her into who she was. She couldn’t pretend like she had done anything wrong, but she couldn’t discount Holden’s feelings either. It was one of the many tug-of-wars that cropped up in any sort of relationship, platonic or romantic. People could hurt each other without meaning to. People could grieve and recover and still hurt others in the process. She felt hot anger rise up in her—not at Holden, but at Marco, who had tried so hard to shave her down to nothing. Naomi let it rise up and out of her. No use letting it poison her, not now. She could be angry at Marco, but she couldn’t change the past.

Naomi breathed in deep, steeling herself. Holden was hurt, and she thought she had a solution. It wasn’t an easy solution, not for her, but it was there. It was a leap she was willing to take for him. For Amos. For the survival of this new relationship between the three of them.

“You don’t need to apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Again, Holden’s lips twitched with the ghost of a smile. “Neither did you.”

“No. Neither of us did anything wrong. That happens a lot, you know. No one does anything wrong and everything still sucks.”

He made a soft humming noise. They sat in silence for a few moments, just taking in the pungent earthy smell and the tempo of each other’s breaths. Suddenly, Holden laughed. It was a bitter, harsh sound, and he seemed a little embarrassed by it.

“I talked to my mom. She said this was the sort of conversation you had over a bottle of wine.”

Naomi laughed too. It felt right, though she didn’t quite get why he was laughing. Holden shook his head and continued,

“I’ve been holding stuff back, I guess. From you and Amos.”

Hesitantly, she reached out to place a hand on his thigh. The touch seemed to sooth him. “Talk to me about that.” He leaned back a little, his eyes falling to the snaking tree roots. She watched him trace their path with his gaze.

“Just…I’ve been thinking. I guess I’ve been a little insecure.”

She nodded. His cheeks were a little pink, his stare cast downwards. She could tell that he was struggling, torn between protecting his feelings and his fear of hurting her. Of driving her away. Given what Amos had told her, that fear was boiling now, threatening to burst his seams. She wished she could pluck his thoughts from his head. She wished she could find a way to tell him that he could be honest with her, completely honest, and for him to believe her when she said it. She knew how afraid Holden was of mis-stepping in relationships.

“Jim,” Naomi said softly. “I think I know what this is about. So just say it, and we’ll talk about it.”

Holden looked up and then placed his own hand on top of hers. He took a deep, slow breath and then began to speak.

“We didn’t talk about you leaving. We should have talked about it, but we didn’t really. We just…we just acted like everything was back to normal, when it wasn’t. Things changed. Which isn’t bad, but we didn’t talk about it.” She nodded, letting him know that she was listening. He made a noise of despair, a soft animal whine in the back of his throat that he didn’t seem to notice.

“I just felt so alone when you were gone. I know I had Amos and Alex but they aren’t _you_. And I was scared for you. For us. And now we’re all back together, and now we have this thing with you, me, and Amos, and I just—”

Holden paused at a loss for words. His gaze slipped down to his shoes again. “I realized that it would be so easy for you to leave me again. And I know,” he paused to swallow, “I know that’s self-centered. I know that’s not fair to you.”

Naomi desperately wanted to interrupt him, shake him, slap him. How could he possibly think that was self-centered? How could he look at his own fears and think that they were unfair to her? Fear of abandonment was the most basic of human emotions. Fear of abandonment had shaped human societies for ages. If there was one fact of human nature, it was that people were terrified of being lonely. Holden knew that, didn’t he?

“I feel really shitty about this,” Holden continued, “but I got really into my own head about you and Amos, and how close you are, and how…I don’t have that with either of you. And then Amos said that you told him that you loved him. And that’s why I freaked out with Amos. I’m sorry.”

There it was, the trigger to this whole night. She had expected something along those lines, and so his confession didn’t surprise it, though it did make her a little sad. She waited to make sure he was done before speaking. “You don’t need to feel shitty about that, Jim. It’s…well, I don’t think it’s that weird to worry about that. I’m not saying you need to worry, just that I think it was bound to come up. Amos and I have known each other for…a long time. We’ve had each other’s backs for a long time. But what you and I have? It’s newer, but it’s still wonderful in its own way. Amos is trying to figure it out, you know. I don’t know if you notice him watching us. He sees the way we act, the way we treat each other, and maybe it makes him a little jealous, too.”

“I don’t know if Amos feels jealousy,” Holden said with a sad laugh. Then he frowned and sighed. “I really hate that word.”

“No one likes feeling jealous. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Besides, that’s only part of the puzzle here.” Holden looked at her dubiously. She could tell that he was still ripping himself apart inside. She knew that she would never be able to convince him that this wasn’t his fault, not entirely.

“I won’t apologize for leaving when I did. I can’t. I needed to do it. But I can acknowledge how much it sucked. God, it fucking sucked. I missed you and then I was mad at you and then I missed you even more.” She moved down the bench a little so that she was closer to him and took his hand. “I wish I had told you how much I love you before I left. I thought about it a lot.” Jim’s surprise was evident on his face. “I love you. I do. It’s hard for me to say it. I don’t know why, but the words just get stuck when I try to say them. I feels like I’m opening up a part of myself that I won’t be able to close. A part of me that…” she trailed off. Holden squeezed her hand.

Naomi shook her head. “Anyway. I love you, and I know that you need to hear it more often than I say it. And before you say it—no, that’s not selfish. We all have different things that we need from each other. You taught me that, you know. I don’t think you meant to, but you did. It’s okay for people to want different things. Need different things.”

“I just want to respect your boundaries,” Holden said plaintively.

“I know. So, let _me_ decide what my boundaries are. I want to tell you that I love you more, because it was all I could think about when…when you guys went into the ring. I just kept kicking myself because I hadn’t said it and I knew that you wanted to hear it. Needed to hear it. I hope you knew that I did love you—do love you. I try to show you every day. But you need to hear it, too. That’s okay. That’s normal, Jim.”

Holden raised their intertwined hands to his lips and pressed a kiss along her knuckles.

“I love you. I love you because you never make me feel like I have to do anything. I want to say it more. I just want you to know that it’s hard for me to say it, too.”

“That’s okay,” said Holden. “Maybe I just needed to hear it once.”

It was quiet for a few moments, but it was a comfortable sort of quiet. Naomi felt drained, but it felt like something had been lifted off her shoulders. It was the sort of happy soreness after a hard game of handball or a particularly energetic round of sex, sweaty and exhausted and satisfied.

“I like the ways you show me that you love me.” Holden said. “You always pick out beer I like when we go out to eat and I’m in the bathroom or something when the waiter comes. You put the covers back over me if you get up during the night. You take care of the stupid shipping and inventory minutia that I hate. It’s not that I didn’t notice it. It’s just…” he waved his free hand as he fished for the right words.

“You grew up with eight people telling you they loved you all the time?” Naomi quipped. That earned her a genuine laugh.

“I mean, yeah.”

Holden reached up and tugged a few needles from the pine tree. He handed two to her and then began to dissect one with a nail.

“We just need to be open with each other,” Naomi said. The pine needle released a sticky resin as she snapped it in half. It felt a little unpleasant, though the smell was nice.

“I was the one who brought that up. I’m sorry I wasn’t open with you and Amos.”

“It’s okay. Just from now on, we need to be open. Otherwise, this is going to fall apart in an ugly way, and that’s not good for the atmosphere on the ship. Besides, you know it’s only been like, two weeks, right?”

Holden groaned. “We’ve been here two weeks?”

“Not my point, but yeah. This is all new. Well, it’s sort of new. You, me, and Amos have known each other for a while. It feels like a lifetime. But the relationship thing, that’s new, and we’ve been moving a little fast, I guess. But like I said—we’ve known each other so long. We just need to figure things out. Debug the code.”

He laughed at her analogy and pressed another kiss to her hand. “Fair enough.”

“So, let’s head back to the room, and let’s tell Amos that everything is alright.”

“I shouldn’t have left him like that,” Holden mumbled. Naomi shrugged.

“You were hurt. Stop beating yourself up. Amos is probably just confused.”

They took their time walking back together. They stopped so Holden could buy a cup of coffee, because he insisted that he needed it despite the late hour. Naomi kept pausing as they walked to pick pine needles from Holden’s shirt, which made him laugh. She had missed him. Missed them. She hadn’t realized she had still been missing him even as they fell back into their normal routine on the _Roci_.

When they opened the door to their suite, Amos was sitting in one of the chairs, his body stiff and still and his eyes empty. Naomi sucked in a breath, her good mood gone. Fuck. Holden dropped her hand and began to approach the big man slowly. He recognized what was going on too.

But Amos just blinked, his whole body twitching as he seemed to restart himself like a frozen piece of software. “Hey,” he said in his usual cheerful tone, his trademark grin wide on his face. “Guess I was zoning out there, huh?” Naomi glanced at her hand terminal. It had only been a half hour since she had left to find Jim. Amos stood up and walked to the fridge, pulling out a beer for each of them. Holden glanced at her, and she shrugged while Amos’ back was turned. When she glanced over at the coffee table, she noted that the bottle of sambuca that the boys had been nursing earlier was still half full. The odd feeling that had been growing in her chest disappeared.

Amos handed them each their beverage. He seemed to be having a hard time looking at Jim; he watched his own hands as he handed the man his beer, resolutely avoiding his captain’s eyes.

“Everything’s alright, Amos,” Naomi reassured. Amos blinked at her, confused. “We talked. Everything’s alright.”

Amos shifted back on his heels. “A’ight.” He glanced back and forth between Holden and Naomi, clearly uncertain about how to proceed. Naomi could see him stiffening, his face growing empty.

These talks would never be easy with him. She had known that the first time she had thought about what a relationship with Amos would be like. Amos liked to be told what to do; he liked having people around him who made choices for him. Amos, at the end of the day, liked stability. But Naomi knew that a relationship based on such an unequal power dynamic would never work. She knew that fact intimately. Amos would have to stretch himself a bit, just like she had promised to do for Jim. They could take their time, though. They didn’t have to stretch Amos so far that he snapped again. She remembered making hand pastries with one of her aunts as a kid, being taught not to stretch the yeasted dough too far. _You have to let it rest, dusiwala_ , her aunt would chide when she eagerly tried to get the dough thinner and thinner. She’d have to see how far they could get tonight.

“Do you want to talk about this now?” she asked him. The question caught Amos off guard. He regarded Naomi, finally shrugging.

“Whatever. Sure.”

She gave him a look that he knew well. Amos looked at Holden, then back at her. Holden smiled warmly at him, then busied himself with cracking open his beer. Trying his best to communicate that there was no pressure. That they were okay, that they could wait.

“If it’s not now, it’s not gonna be anytime soon,” Amos admitted. It would have to do. Jim spoke first.

“You know how I gave you guys that speech about communication and openness a few weeks ago?”

Amos snorted at the irony of the situation and sipped at his beer. Holden gave him a sheepish smile, running his fingers through his dark hair. “Yeah, turns out I was the one not talking about how I was feeling.”

What Amos said next surprised Naomi. “I know that. I thought it was weird the way the two of you just fell back into step,” he said, gesturing to the pair of them with his beer. “Just, I dunno, Alex and I thought it was weird. Kinda seemed like you two were avoiding talking about it. And since he thought it was weird, I knew I wasn’t that off-base.”

Holden’s cheeks had gone a little pink. Amos’ admission, nonchalant as it was, made her feel a bit guilty. She didn’t like to think that he and Alex had been uncomfortable, and that guilt was enough to overshadow any annoyance she would have normally felt about them speculating on she and Jim’s relationship. At the same time, she was a little surprised Amos had picked up on it. It struck her that it wasn’t the sort of thing he would have noticed back on the _Cant_.

“I’m sorry,” Jim said quietly. “I didn’t—”

“No apologies,” Amos interjected. “We were just a little worried is all. Honest.”

A few beats of silence passed between them. Naomi wanted to let Jim speak, and Amos didn’t notice the awkwardness.

“You’re not wrong,” Holden said at last. “Naomi and I…we didn’t really talk, I guess.”

Amos nodded resolutely. His face was expressionless, as it always was. He pulled the tab from the can of beer and started to bend it in his fingers. His eyes had fallen again. “I get it, Cap. It was a fun couple’a weeks, but you and Naomi gotta work some stuff out. I told you from the get-go, no hard feelings from me. Same to you, boss,” he said, gesturing toward Naomi. She shook her head, unsure what else to do. Did he think they had come here to dump him?

“What? No!” Jim exclaimed, mirroring her own thoughts. “No, that’s not…Amos, that’s not what we’re saying.”

“Oh.” Naomi didn’t think she was imagining the relief that crossed Amos’ face.

“It’s not about me and Naomi. Well, it is, but it’s about all of us too. I wasn’t being honest with you.”

“You weren’t really being honest with yourself,” Naomi interjected. Holden shrugged, and Amos chuckled.

“Sure,” Holden agreed. “But we need to be open. All of us. I guess I’m just reiterating that.”

Again, Amos just nodded. He and Jim watched each other for a minute, then Jim nodded too. Naomi didn’t know what that meant, but the big man seemed satisfied with the reaction. Seemed they were developing their own secret language, just as Amos and Naomi had years and years ago. The thought made her smile.

“I love both of you, and I’m still freaked out that this is going to fall apart. That’s why I walked out earlier. I’m sorry.”

Amos blinked at Holden, staring at him like he had pronounced that the sky was blue. “Yeah, I know. No hard feelings, Cap.”

“Okay,” Holden said. The three of them sipped at their drinks, waiting for someone else to say something. Naomi watched them both. Jim still looked a little panicked, a little flustered, but Amos looked surprisingly thoughtful.

Holden sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. “Alright, then. I would love to sit on the couch and watch something stupid with both of you. You in?”

“Sounds nice,” Naomi said. Amos hesitated.

“What’s up?” Holden asked. Always one to wear his emotions on his sleeves, he couldn’t hide the tinge of hurt in his tone.

“I just…” the mechanic began, trailing off to scratch at the stubble of his fade. He shook his head, reset. “The whole ‘I love you’ thing. Keeps coming up tonight.”

Amos paused for a good few seconds, fishing for whatever he was trying to say. When he sighed, it sounded frustrated. “I guess I do love you both, at least in the way I know how to love anything. Which, you know, I don’t think is ever going to be quite right.” Holden opened his mouth to say something. Naomi stopped him with a gentle touch to his back. Amos looked sad, which was on odd expression on the man. She didn’t think she had ever seen him _sad_ ; angry, hurt, sure, but never sad. She wondered what he had been thinking about when she and Holden were gone.

“I just like being near you. I like making you smile. I like beating the shit out of anyone who wants to hurt you. But I don’t know, maybe that’s not love. I don’t think I know what love really is. So, I guess I love you in the best way I can. Sorry.”

Holden was grinning. Naomi thought his eyes looked a little misty. She’d tease him for being a sap if she didn’t know how much he needed to hear it. It was such an odd juxtaposition to the look on Amos’ face, that odd, defeated melancholy that looked so foreign on him.

“You don’t need to explain it, Amos,” said Jim. Naomi couldn’t help but agree.

Amos stared at them both. “I love you, I think,” he said as if he were trying out words in a different language. “I’ll keep trying to.”

It was so earnest, so like Amos. Naomi felt her heart throb with fierce adoration. Amos shook his head and chugged the rest of his beer just as Holden opened his mouth to say something else. He shut it again, amused and understanding. They’d talk about this another time.

“A’ight, enough of that,” Amos said. “Let’s watch something stupid.” He plucked his beer from the kitchen counter and walked toward the living room of their hotel suite.

“Got something in mind, big guy?” Holden said, trailing after him. He grabbed Naomi’s hand and pulled her along with him.

“Something we don’t have to talk through,” Amos groused. Naomi laughed, sitting down next to Amos on the couch. Holden sat on her other side with a contented sigh. They settled in together as Amos began to absentmindedly flip through the entertainment feeds.

“Okay, don’t kill me,” Holden said. Naomi rolled her eyes playfully. “This is nice, though. This whole thing—us—it’s really nice. I just want you guys to know.”

Amos laughed and reached behind Naomi’s shoulder so that he could brush his hand against Holden’s shoulder. “Alright, Romeo. Yeah, it’s nice. Shut up and watch the damn show.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this chapter of many emotions. You can find me on tumblr at pig-wings.tumblr.com!


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